Gregory Euclide has always intertwined painting with nature-inspired elements; elaborately-rendered traditional, yet graphic landscapes, crumpled and scientifically sampled into otherworldly dioramas. First featured in Hi-Fructose Vol. 14 and here on our blog, Euclide’s work has taken on several forms over the years, from his snow globe-like “bio-spherescapes” that seem to defy gravity and riverbeds ‘growing’ from spilled paint. He continues to challenge the typical “rules” for two and three-dimensional art, including his own.
His upcoming solo “Extract” at Hashimoto Contemporary in San Francisco expands upon this convergence of elements within his work. In the artist’s own words: “The forms fracture the pictorial space, at times, inhabiting the frames, robbing them of their ability to define a single view and inviting a phenomenological exploration by the viewer.” Featuring new sculptures, paintings, and relief works, the show takes a look at the significance of these “extracted” materials in the context of Euclide’s immediate environment. For instance, one element implemented throughout is the Buckthorn root, a highly- invasive plant first brought to the US as a garden shrub, from which Euclide creates a dark pigment.
Euclide tends to describe his work as “contemporary landscape painting” in order to explain his complex combinations of natural and hand-made elements which he sources near his home in the Minnesota River Valley: coffee cups, styrofoam, and other pieces of litter also become a part of the ecosystem’s narrative from wilderness to a place intervened by modern culture. Beginning first with traditional painting techniques, each piece involves gradually building upon the image in layers of paint and materials until the final piece becomes a vignette of mediums- the complexity in Euclide’s art is a direct reflection of nature’s complexity. Euclide’s “Extract” opens at Hashimoto Contemporary on April 7th, 2016.
Surreal and haunting, 
