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ERIC DEVER: POINTS OF INTEREST
ERIC DEVER: POINTS OF INTEREST
Berry Campbell, 2025
Excerpt from Eric Dever: In the Time of Plants
By Dr. Giovanni Aloi, Ph.D.
In Eric Dever’s paintings, time is neither background nor metaphor, it is substance. Just as the garden stages a choreography of slow unfolding, Dever’s canvases are accumulations of temporal gestures, each brushstroke a pulse in the continuum of material and spiritual becomings. The plants he paints—roses, nasturtium, magnolias—do not merely immortalize the gorgeousness of nature; they participate in a visual process where matter and memory grow together, entwined like tendrils. Color, often layered in luminous strata or scraped back to show the weave of the canvas’s coarse linen, functions not as surface decoration but as temporal sediment. The unpainted portions of the canvas breathe with absence marking intervals of reflection, loss, or evoking the elusive work of subterranean life. These voids are not empty; they hold the same potentiality as a wintering bulb or a fallow field.
Painting, for Dever, is a kind of cultivation: an aesthetic tending through which growth, decay, and renewal are made visible in oil and wax. In this way, his work does not merely depict plants but it performs a deep vegetal attunement. The canvas becomes a zone where the temporalities of the garden, the artist, and planetary revolutions can align: poetic detritus, traces of moments lived across multiple root systems, invisibly connected, actual, as well as metaphorical. Here, painting is not a record of time passed, but a field of potentialities anchored by vegetal wisdom.
Essay Dr. Giovanni Aloi, Ph.D.
Designed by Mark Robinson
Published by Berry Campbell
Printed by GHP Media, Connecticut
THE JOURNAL OF NATURE IN VISUAL CULTURE
ISSUE 67 — SUMMER 2025
ISSUE 67 — SUMMER 2025
Gardens are autobiographical spaces, relentlessly co-authored by constantly evolving communities of gardeners, some equipped with spades, others with claws and some more endowed with long roots. In collaboration with the soil, this process of coauthoring results in open ended narratives that emerge and dissolve, leaving behind traces of minerals and decomposing matter.
Gardens are endless processes of resistance, resilience, and regeneration; sedimentations of past and present participations that always edge into a mostly unpredictable future of germination, dissemination, and attraction.
But first and foremost, gardens are chapters of multispecies-desire. In a garden, acts of control—pruning, planting, fencing—intertwine with gestures of surrender to decay, chance, and change. Gardens are simultaneously curated and wild, political and ecological, personal and collective. Once displays of aristocratic power, gardens have evolved alongside our shifting relationships with nature.
It might not be inappropriate to state that today, gardens in contemporary art have become more than a new genre. Their unstoppable and over evolving fluidity a challenge to the austerity and fetishization of purity and timelessness that has characterized our western museums for many centuries.
This issue of Antennae, the one the proceeded it, and the one that will follow, are dedicated to gardening as creative process. We need to take gardens very seriously as legitimate artistic sites and media: organic tissues generated by resilient and dedicate nurturing capable of uprooting our disciplinary and institutional certainties to show us how we can reimagine art from scratch.
My gratitude goes to all the contributors to this issue, to Antennae’s academic board for its ceaseless support and expertise and to everyone else who has made this exploration possible.
Dr Giovanni Aloi
Editor in Chief
contributors:
Maria Thereza Alves | Christian Jil R. Benitez | Kay Chubbuck
| Julianne Clark | Eric Dever | Deama Khader | Keiko Lee-Hem
| David Rimanelli | Pamela Martínez Rod | Maggie Shirley
| Felicity Talman | Mauricio Tolosa | Julia Lines
New Rules Next Week, Corita Kent’s Legacy through the Eyes of Twenty Artists and Writers
Chronicle Books, San Francisco, 2023. Eric Dever essay pp 77-80, excerpt:
"Corita collaborated with and quoted many artists. My personal favorites include poets, writers, and playwrights such as Joseph Pintauro, Daniel Berrigan, and e.e. cummings. Today, it comes as no surprise to me that Corita highlights John Cage in the final rule: 'We’re breaking all of the rules. Even our own rules. And how do we do that? By leaving plenty of room for X quantities.' —John Cage
New Rules Next Week available at MoMA and the Corita Center bookstores.
Eric Dever: Warhol Montauk Project
MagCloud, New York, 2021
A catalog of 17 important paintings Dever produced as part of his residency project at the Warhol Foundation/Nature Conservancy, a 15-acre preserved oceanfront in Montauk, New York's easternmost tip. Midpoint through the project, Dever turned his attention from Amsterdam Beach to the greater Montauk area, inspired by a brochure distributed at the Montauk Lighthouse, The Explorer’s Club, published in the 1950s, highlighting historical sites important to the Montauketts and the people of Eastern Long Island. Also included is a Q&A with Marianela Jiminez and an essay by Berry Campbell, New York.
MagCloud, New York, 2020
13 mixed media works, painting and collage by Eric Dever, who finds meaning and inspiration in each line of this mesmerizing poem by Emily Dickenson.
Eric Dever: Light, Energy and Matter
MagCloud, Los Angeles, 2017
A 60 page exhibition catalog of 45 paintings which brings the viewer on a journey, similar to the path of the artist himself.
“Overtime, I began to develop a sense of mixing qualities of light, energy and matter, as one would mix color or hue. Some paintings feel heavy or contained, while others are explosive or very light, though each work is related and part of a whole.”
This approach embraces Dever’s interest in color’s shifting correspondence with light (white), energy (red), and matter (black). These color phenomena also echo Dever’s studies of material nature, and the gunas, subtle qualities woven together that underlie all of existence as presented in Samkhya philosophy, Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras and the Bhagavad Gita (14.5):
Clarity, passion, dark inertia. These are qualities that originate from nature.
Clarity, Passion and Dark Inertia: Paintings by Eric Dever
MagCloud, New York, 2015
A 44 page exhibition catalog including reproductions of 29 paintings and 2 installation views, presented by New York University, Kimmel Galleries.
A decade long process, Dever limited his palette for 4 years to white alone and uncovered a white spectrum ranging from opacity to translucency. He then introduced black, working through grayscales, and in 2010 began testing a variety of prepared red hues and arrived at Napthol Scarlet, discovering a surprising range and quantity of tones, all from red, black, and white alone.
This approach embraces Dever’s interest in color’s shifting correspondence with matter (black), energy (red), and light (white). These color phenomena also echo Dever’s studies of material nature as presented in Samkhya philosophy, Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras and in the Bhagavad Gita.
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