I met artist John Paul Kesling almost nine years ago. We connected over a Sunday afternoon porter back when he was still pulling drafts at Vinyl Tap. Kesling was new to Nashville, but I’d seen his work online and recognized his name. The artist had his first solo exhibition at Galerie Tangerine in 2017, and the Kentucky-born painter quickly established himself among Nashville’s brush-slingers. During his time in Nashville, Kesling has formed an ongoing relationship with Red Arrow, and he’s one of the artists who helped build the East Nashville gallery’s ascendant reputation. It’s fitting, then, that Red Arrow partnered with the Bankers Alley Hotel for the painter’s latest exhibition, which is Kesling’s last show as a Nashvillian.
One of the most engaging aspects of Kesling’s productive practice is how his attention floats between pure abstraction, surreal narratives and emotive portraiture. All three are included in Dear John: Goodbyes, Portals and Paths Not Taken. The show is soaked with color, and Kesling’s unrestrained embrace of multiple media finds ripped canvas, graphite powder, glitter, plywood and cardboard all smeared, sprinkled and glued into the mix. But for all the show’s chromatic materiality, Dear John’s farewell themes hang a little heavy and gray. It’s not a sad display, but it’s melancholy and contemplative. It’s a perfectly programmed spring season art show that delivers the flowers as well as the rain.
The Bankers Alley Hotel opened in downtown Nashville in the summer of 2023. It occupies the historic Gray & Dudley Building, the former home of a 21c Museum Hotel. 21c boasts a world-class, international, contemporary art collection that travels among the expansive gallery spaces featured at all the luxury chain’s locations. Bankers Alley preserves the hotel’s gallery spaces and art-forward aesthetic. But Bankers Alley curator Anna McKeown’s exhibition programming — as well as the hotel’s growing art collection — is admirably focused on artists working right here in Middle Tennessee. Bankers Alley is currently featuring a solo show by musician and multimedia artist Rod McGaha in its main gallery, along with smaller displays by Zoe Nichols, and Andrés Bustamante’s community art project, Persona Contemporary.
"The Kiss (After Klimt)," John Paul Kesling
McKeown’s gallery design highlights two of Dear John’s large narrative canvases. Both feature bold palettes, with renderings of dreamlike stories that combine animals and natural spaces in scenes infused with equal measures of tragedy and salvation. In “Two x Two,” Kesling deploys oils, acrylic, chalk, colored pencil, fabric and more to evoke a verdant tableau featuring a small deer, deep woods and a tree bent in an arch. Indigenous Tennesseans traditionally bent and secured saplings to grow into trail-marker trees — landmarks denoting significant places or through-ways in the woods. Kesling paints the deer accompanied by an identical, transparent version of the animal standing behind it like a ghostly shadow. The painting is full of texture and light, but in the background, beyond a treeline, the picture plummets into a void of crimson. I was reminded of the red curtains on a theater stage hiding the mechanics of the surreal scene set before the viewer. “Two x Two” is spooky and hopeful all at once, and it’s emblematic of a display that’s not afraid of embracing contradictions.
"Dancing Fiona," John Paul Kesling
“No Safe Place” is another large work that kept catching my eye while I was working through the rest of the exhibition. This paint-and-graphite-on-cardboard piece is one of the rawest in the show — it’s displayed in an artist’s frame Kesling fashioned from wooden canvas stretcher bars. “No Safe Place” is an abstracted affair, but attentive viewers will discern a really big fish, a smaller shark, the ambiguous form of a person, and an inflatable raft. The whole scene gives big “Jonah and the Whale” vibes, but Kesling doesn’t make any particular reading easy. In one sense, the figure looks like it’s sinking into water. But it also looks like it’s crawling safely ashore on all fours. Is the shark smiling? Is the bigger whale-like fish nonthreatening? Or is it just biding its time until dinner?
For Kesling, death, grief, survival and painting all go together. His Pieta series memorializes the victims of mass shootings. Hometown Opioid Portraits is his ongoing documentary series of painted portraits memorializing people from Ashland, Ky., who have died in the opioid epidemic. Kesling grew up in Ashland, and his younger brother is one of more than a million Americans who’ve lost their lives in the drug crisis. In the midst of all Kesling’s success in Nashville and around the region — he’s represented by a handful of galleries throughout the South — his Kentucky roots have always been close to the surface. And recent posts on the artist’s social media pages read like a countdown before Kesling relocated back to the Bluegrass State to help care for aging family members.
"Flowers vs. the Volcano," John Paul Kesling
The best example of Dear John’s divergent displays is “Exploding in Blues” — a diptych that pairs a still life of a vase of buoyant, blossoming flowers with a fully Abstract Expressionist panel that mixes plenty of gooey black, green and brown brushwork in with the title’s cool hues. Kesling uses oil sticks, acrylics and pearlescent pigments to render his flowerheads with a neon-like glow — the layering effect recalls the look of Warhol’s floral screen prints. The companion panel reads like the stinky, slimy, oxidized remnants of a bouquet that’s overstayed its welcome. The work, like this show, invites viewers with an enticing display, and the long corridor gallery at Bankers Alley is spacious enough for long looks and lingering. But with Dear John, every hello is bent like a sapling that grows into an old, twisted wooden arch that points to a goodbye.
Johnny, we hardly knew you.
