Five Car Garage is thrilled to present HEDON EDEN, the first solo exhibition by New Mexico based artist Raychael Stine. Hedon Eden is an homage to the ecstatic blooming and sensual growth of the self. The kind of transformation that ‘Spring’ expresses so precisely herself after having been so tightly coiled in a bud, after a long, dark, and impossible winter. Rendered through exuberant abstractions with varied applications of paint, this new body of work comprises both of Stine’s “Vision” and “Jammer” paintings which synthesize the interplay between the diffuse yet striking aural color of her Vision paintings, and the corporeal and immutable Jammer paintings In her ‘Jammer,’ series Stine, who cites British painter Howard Hodgkin as an influence, adopts a similar approach to her work when it comes to Hodgkin’s ‘frame within a frame,’ construction of paintings. She also embodies a shared joyful use of color and thick brush application, but the similarity stops there. Stine sees her work with the frames, more as a threshold, or a portal and a succinct gateway for her audience to step through, before fully immersing themselves into The Stine universe.

HEDON EDEN Raychael Stine Five Car Garage Once inside her screen within a screen, the artist’s vocabulary is on full volume, with thick muscular paint confidently slashed across the canvas with ecstatic colors. These gestures are punctuated with spritely petals, rainbows, tromp l’oeil teardrops, and ‘secret’ dogs with hidden snouts poking through the brush marks. As Stine successfully brings her viewer into her land, she likes to keep the playful energy going, reminding her lookers of the frame and our larger awareness that they are still on the realm of being inside a picture. The tempo is gentler in the ‘Vision’ paintings, where Stine incorporates time, light, and space from memory, from pictures. They mark a transitional space between material and picture, object/image, and painting.

The ‘Vision’ is a direct nod to the actual processes of vision-focus in the foreground on the subject and diffuse in the back. It suggests an unclear amount of depth, and it is the in-between depth that Stine is most interested in having us float about in. This transitional and transformative space tends to be the subject of the vision paintings themselves. In Hedon Edon, Stine dispenses through her paintings the sensate charges of play and desire, calling up the regenerative power of nature to capture this hedonistic expression, that primates and vegetable/flower forms have no fear or repression in displaying. Everything is in full bloom in Raychael Stine’s universe and we are invited to the dance.

B 1981 Cleveland Ohio. Stine’s work has been exhibited in solo exhibitions at Art Palace Gallery Houston TX, Richard Levy Gallery, ABQ NM; Eugene Binder Gallery Marfa TX; Marty Walker Gallery Dallas TX, Road Agent Gallery Dallas TX, and group and two-person exhibitions at Five Car Garage, Los Angeles CA; Rhona Hoffman Gallery, Chicago IL; Common People in Brooklyn NY, Denise Bibro Gallery in New York NY; D.Berman Gallery in Austin TX; Barry Whistler Gallery in Dallas TX; Gallery 400, Leviton A + D Gallery Chicago, and Jekyll and Hyde Gallery in Chicago, Illinois, and others. Her work has been reviewed in KCRW Art Insider LA, Glasstire, New City Chicago, Bad At Sports, Southwest Contemporary, THE magazine, TX Arts and Culture, NY Magazine, Artlies, Houston Chronicle, and others. Stine was selected for New American Paintings Issues 132, 120, and 78 where she was awarded Juror’s Pick, the New Insight Exhibition at Art Chicago, and her work was exhibited in the Texas Biennial 2008. She is a recipient of the Dallas Museum of Art Degoylier Grant, the Stone Award Scholarship at UIC, and the Gendler Fellowship as an artist in residence at the Bemis Center for Contemporary Art. A two time Joan Mitchell painter and sculptor award nominee, Raychael Stine is currently Associate Professor of Painting and Drawing at the University of New Mexico.