Charles Mayton is New York-based contemporary artist, whose paintings combine the abstract and the schematic, exploring the questions of time, language and performance in painting, straddling abstraction and figuration.
Mayton was born in 1974 in Florida. He studied at the Ringling School of Art and Design, and graduated from Milton Avery School of the Arts at Bard College in 2007.
Mayton’s paintings are tantalizingly beautiful, with vivid hues of paint swept across canvases featuring bright semiotic symbols, including question marks, quotations, and clouds. This quality places a premium on the tangible, as a reminder that the best way to incite the unconscious, to release the imagination, is to begin with the overtly physical. Charles Mayton’s practice examines the various ways in which cultural artefacts can be redistributed and reanimated, with an increasingly acclaimed aspect of this enquiry centered on painting about painting. In essence, Mayton’s work provides an inspired documentation of inspiration itself, a pictorial overview of the various ways in which another’s creativity can trigger our own in a constant process of reproduction and renewal.
Charles Mayton’s first solo show in New York, entitled The Difficult Crossing was held in 2011. It was a three-dimensional realization of his 1926 painting of the same title, by René Magritte, which depicts an artist’s studio, the starting point for an array of responses to the Belgian surrealist’s image. Magritte is not an unconscious inspiration here but a decidedly conscious one. Ranging from dissections of Magritte’s perspectival framework to analyses of color palette, Mayton’s painterly quotations and paintings that also reference the practice of making them veer from overt borrowings to far less obvious, meandering meditations. By plunging the viewer into the center of Magritte’s canvas, Mayton conjures a world that demands that one consider the role of the unconscious within the artist’s studio, a place where ideas take material shape. Given that our daily experience increasingly plays out against a digital wasteland of information, it’s worth pausing for a moment to remember the ethos of the Surrealists. Mayton builds on the group’s pursuit of psychic freedom, stimulating a dialogue about the importance of artistic creation and its relationship to consciousness.
Charles Mayton’s work has been displayed in numerous group and several solo exhibitions, in Paris, New York, Dallas and London. He lives and works in New York.
Year | Exhibition Title | Gallery/Museum | Solo/Group | |
---|---|---|---|---|
2015 | Tableau Table Tavolo | American Academy, Rome | Solo | |
2015 | Heather Guertin, Eberhard Havekost, Peter Mandradjieff, Charles Mayton, Zak Prekop, Torben Ribe | Galerie Hussenot, Paris | Group | |
2014 | A Moveable Feast | Part XII, Campoli Presti, Paris | Solo | |
2014 | Ô,TÄPSE | David Lewis, New York | Solo | |
2014 | Hypothesis for an Exhibition | Dominique Levy Gallery, New York | Group | |
2014 | Slow Learner | Timothy Taylor Gallery, London | Group | |
2014 | Lucas Knipscher | Charles Mayton - End Of The Night Café | Thomas Duncan Gallery, Los Angeles, CA | Group | |
2013 | Five Red Herrings | Campoli Presti, London | Solo | |
2013 | Two-Step | The Power Station, Dallas | Solo | |
2013 | A Scanner, Darkly | David Lewis Gallery, New York | Group | |
2013 | Avant de Rentrer, Il Faut Incendier la Maison | Thomas Duncan Gallery, Los Angeles | Group | |
2013 | Painter Painter | The Walker Art Center, Minneapolis | Group | |
2013 | Everything and All of That | Simone Subal Gallery, New York City, NY | Group | |
2013 | From where I come … maybe … I don’t’ know | Galleria Raucci, Santamaria, Naples | Group | |
2012 | The Muse Venale | BaliceHertling, Paris | Solo | |
2012 | Needles in the Camel’s Eye | Thomas Duncan Gallery, Los Angeles | Group | |
2012 | Foreign Figs for Florence Dingum at Villa Romana | Villa Romana, Florence | Group | |
2011 | The Difficult Crossing | BaliceHertling & Lewis, New York | Solo | |
2011 | Balice Hertling & Lewis | Front Desk Apparatus, New York | Group | |
2011 | Vide-Poche | Sculpture Center, Long Island City | Group | |
2011 | Best of 2011 | Soloway, Brooklyn | Group | |
2010 | 179 Canal Anyways | White Columns, New York Don | Group | |
2010 | Juan in the Village , curated by Bjarne Melgaard | Lars Bohman Gallery, Stockholm | Group | |
2009 | Leave No Trace: Troughs, Phantom Limbs | International Studio Curatorial Program, Brooklyn | Group | |
2009 | No Bees, No Blueberries Saloon | Harris Lieberman Gallery, New York | Group | |
2009 | Am Nuden Da | Session 2, Flags London | Group | |
2009 | New Images , Unisex | Kevin Bruk Gallery, Miami | Group | |
2009 | No Bees, No Blueberries | I-cabin, London | Group | |
2009 | Session_2_Flags | Am Nuden Da, London | Group | |
2008 | Hermann’s Grid, curated by Gareth James | Galleria Franco Soffiantino Arte Contemporanea, Turin | Group | |
2008 | The Grey House That Thinks Itself Into Your Head Without Asking | Peter Fingesten Gallery-Pace University, New York | Group | |
2008 | Wish You Were Here | TAT, Berlin | Group | |
2007 | New Misunderstandings-Return of the Same | Moti Hasson Gallery, New York | Group | |
2007 | Brief Encounters | Caren Golden Fine Art, New York City, NY | Group |