NATURE REMAINS

“Every great work of art constitutes a complete image of life, conveying in a palpable way the image-maker’s awe at the way things are.”

- J. F. Martel

Eric Aho has rightly been called an abstract artist who paints landscapes. Yet, there is a reason for Aho’s motionless lakes and forested clearings, his surging headwaters, lakes, waterfalls and rivers of pine-drowning runoff or stone-crushing ice.

Aho’s work images a three-way conversation between the qualities of painting (principally color, texture, and geometry), our connection to the earth, and the loss of that connection. For Aho, who works from a hybrid of observation and memory, landscape painting is a way of possessing something we cannot possess, hovering between perception and what’s considered “real,” something there and not there, eluding our grasp. It is also a way of situating intimacy within the physical immensity of the everchanging natural world.

The largest work here, the four-paneled Quartermaster, reads like something of a primer. The term denotes someone in charge of organizing important implements, a member of a military or similar outfit whose job is to keep track of the tools essential for survival or otherwise necessary for the mission. It constitutes a dissolving narrative between Aho’s idiosyncratic, semi-representational marks and the blue vaporous space that envelops all once the expansive canvas is crossed.

Half-submerged tree limbs jut like runic lettering scrawled across the foregrounds of works like Pond Edge and Trillium and Mists, Vernal Pool, taunting, cryptic, and ultimately undecipherable. Elsewhere, depth opens only to be negated by surface. (There is one other species of painting that both offers depth and negates it, the variety that used to be called “religious.”) An almost mystical element resonates in works like Mirrored Lake in a Violet-Dark Forest (48” x 52”), where rocks and shoreline scrub don phosphorescent haloes; enigmatic colors and shapes emerge from mirror-still waters, waver and jag in and out of focus and definition and vanish like smoke toward nebulous mountains under a restless sky.

We possess life and then we don’t; it is not perhaps entirely overreach to posit a corresponding metaphysics of desire and loss inherent in this work. But for Aho, nature is above all generative, a fertile filed for the creative imagination, and landscape is the theater in which the human drama plays out.

A work like Winter Forest inhabits an indeterminate space between representation and abstraction. Other paintings, such as Vernal Pool and Miles Notch or Pond Edge, Wild Spring, No. 2, play with the fragmentary nature of looking and seeing that in fact constitutes what’s there (and what’s not) for both painter and viewer. Surface and space trade places; the strange script of drowned pines punctuates a checkerboard that stands for the pond’s surface. Further, on distinctions melt away between water, earth, and air; an aqueous blue light dissolves the line between sky, pond, and shore, and a wild gestural calligraphy of pink, green, and orange pushes against the detached ochres of aged pines, the whole perforated by gleaming lights and complex dusky grays.

At once decisive and inconclusive, these new paintings open to the viewer, spatially and otherwise, in a way that neither purely abstract nor fully representational work alone can do. The landscape artist after Modernism confronts two versions of nature, one ordered by rational observation and another just as “real” yet riotous with chaos and what Cezanne called “the confused sensations we bring with us since birth.”

Aho has long been exploring ways to represent these two worlds at once, without the need to choose. He seems to handle shards of reality with such force and immediacy as to rid the artwork of all that does not conform to direct experience. The result, built by the sheer joy of placing one brushstroke, be it bright or unsettling, next to another, is always gorgeous, unruly painting with a kind of beauty that lives in a place where, as the artist admits of his process, “there is no tidy solution.”

It’s been more than 150 years since Dostoyevsky predicted, in The Idiot, that “beauty will save the world.” If we have refused for some time now to admit beauty’s existence, much less give it Dostoyevsky’s chance to save us, it’s not impossible that beauty has, in fact, been saving us all along.

American culture lives inside a blur of technological slight-ofhand, conveniently distracted by the deadening surface from the dispiriting realities below. Art like Aho’s can help us believe again in this world by emboldening us to admit the reality that unfashionable qualities such as awe, astonishment, and the beautiful are preeminent qualities of human life and the universe, along with the discomfiting implications that such a reality entails.

True artistic expression, according to philosopher J. F. Martel, is contingent upon “an underlying wonderment at being itself,” a kind of astonishment at realities “denied or repressed in the everyday.” Such artworks themselves astonish, and the world is better for having them. “We realize afterwards,” Martel writes, “that the world is not what we thought it was; something hidden, impossible to communicate though clearly expressed in the work has risen into the light of awareness, and the share of the Real to which we are privy is proportionately expanded.”

- Christopher Volpe

2023

SWISS MOUNTAIN (AFTER BIERSTADT) , 2023

Oil on linen

30 x 36 inches

FROZEN FALLS IN THE MOUNTAINS , 2023

Oil on linen

52 x 48 inches

MOONLIT SNOWFALL , 2023

Oil on linen

52 x 60 inches

FROZEN WATERFALL , 2022

Oil on linen

14 x 11 inches

TRILLIUM AND MISTS, VERNAL POOL , 2022

Oil on linen

78 x 70 inches

VERNAL POOL, WILD ORCHIDS, MILES NOTCH , 2022

Oil on linen

48 x 52 inches

VERNAL POOL, GREEN FORREST (OXFORD COUNTRY) , 2023

Oil on linen

80 x 90 inches

REFLECTING FORMS AT WATER’S EDGE , 2022

Oil on linen

60 x 68 inches

MIRRORED LAKE IN A VIOLET-DARK FOREST , 2022

Oil on linen

48 x 52 inches

BRIGHT HEADWATER , 2021

Oil on linen

52 x 48 inches

POND EDGE, WILD SPRING NO. 2 , 2021

Oil on linen

48 x 52 inches

QUARTERMASTER , 2016

Oil on wood panel (quadriptych)

50 x 160 inches

Eric Aho

Born in Melrose, Massachusetts in 1966

Lives and works in Saxtons River, Vermont

Education

BFA, Massachusetts College of Art, Boston

Diploma, Advanced Studies in Printmaking, Central School of Art and Design, London

Yale School of Art at Norfolk Summer Merit Program 1999

Graduate study, Instituto Superior de Arte, Havana, Cuba; Massachusetts College of Art, Boston

Postgraduate certificate, Institute of Art and Design, Lahti, Finland

Awards

2009 Elected National Academician, National Academy, New York, NY

2003 American-Scandinavian Foundation, New York, NY

2000 The John Koch Award for Painting, National Academy, New York, NY

1998 Julius Hallgarten Prize, National Academy, New York, NY

1997 Vermont Arts Council and the National Endowment for the Arts

Finlandia Foundation, Los Angeles, CA

1994 Pollock-Krasner Foundation Inc., New York, NY

Vermont Community Foundation, Middlebury, VT

1993 American-Scandinavian Foundation, New York, NY

1989 Pace Gallery Scholarship, Massachusetts College of Art, Boston

Selected Solo Exhibitions

2022 Headwater, Burlington City Art Center, VT

Threshold, DC Moore Gallery, New York

2021 Interior, Tayloe Piggott Gallery, Jackson Hole, WY

2019 Waterline, Tayloe Piggott Gallery, Jackson Hole, WY

2017 Meeting Place, Tayloe Piggott Gallery, Jackson Hole, WY

2016 An Unfinished Point in a Vast Surrounding, New Britain Museum of American Art, CT Ice Cuts, Hood Museum of Art, Hanover, NH

2013 In the Landscape, Federal Reserve Board, Washington

2012 Transcending Nature: Paintings by Eric Aho, Currier Museum of Art, Manchester, NH

2009 Eric Aho: Red Winter, DC Moore Gallery, New York

Ice Box, Brattleboro Museum, VT

2008 Wilderness, Alpha Gallery, Boston

1996 Nocturnes, Fleming Museum, University of Vermont, Burlington

1994 Paintings, Gallery Pelin, Helsinki

1991 Paintings from the Hemlock Ravine, Tyler Gallery, Marlboro College, VT

Selected Public Collections

The Art Complex Museum, Duxbury, MA

Ballinglen Arts Foundation, Ballycastle, County Mayo, Ireland

Boston Public Library

Currier Museum of Art, Manchester, NH

Denver Art Museum, CO

Federal Reserve Board, Washington, D.C.

Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco

Fleming Museum, University of Vermont, Burlington

Hood Museum of Art, Hanover, NH

Mead Art Museum, Amherst College, MA

The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Ministry of Culture, Havana, Cuba

Museum of Fine Arts, Boston MA

National Academy Museum, New York

National College of Art, Oslo, Norway

Neuberger Museum of Art, Purchase College, SUNY

New Britain Museum of American Art, CT

The New York Public Library

Ogunquit Museum of American Art, ME

Oulu City Art Museum, Finland

The Provincetown Art Association and Museum, MA

Setesdal Museum, Rysstad, Norway

Springfield Art Museum, MO

Tufts University, Medford, MA

University of the Arts, Helsinki, Finland

University of Cape Town, Cape Town, South Africa

Wake Forest University, Winston-Salem, NC

Fellowships And Residencies

2018 Kate and George Kendall Fellow, MacDowell Colony, Peterborough, NH

2016 DNA Summer Residency, Provincetown, MA

1996 Returning Fellowship, Ballinglen Arts Foundation, Ballycastle, Ireland (1996-2004)

1995 Artist in Residence, Weir Farm National Historic Site, Wilton, CT Artist Fellowship, Ballinglen Arts Foundation, Ballycastle, County Mayo, Ireland

1994 Individual Artists Fellowship, Vermont Council on the Arts, Montpelier

1991 Fulbright Fellowship, Institute of International Education, New York (1991-1992)