Sam Reveles

Beyond the Pale

Talley Dunn Gallery
September 7 – November 2, 2024

Talley Dunn Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition by lauded El Paso-born, Ireland-based artist Sam Reveles. This new series of intricately contemplative drawings and paintings kindle space for existential meditations in color, line, and form. The title of the exhibition, Beyond the Pale, locates this body of work within the origins of the idiom, which has now come to denote impropriety or a lack of social decorum, but once originally referred to the colonial boundary between what was deemed “civilized” and “uncivilized” Ireland as established by English rule. Compelled by these notions of wilderness, wildness, and borders, the artist has looked to that which is grounded in the earth—trees, leaves, and landscapes—to continue his investigations into our relationship with the natural world.

Where Reveles’ last series exhibited at the gallery drew inspiration from inconceivably micro and macro phenomena, traversing atomic structures to expanding galaxies, this most recent body of work reflects more pensively on concerns of the human spirit. Palus V (2024) attempts to capture the elusive color of the “thousand-petalled,” crown chakra, which is sometimes described as a pale violet but remains impossible to resolutely articulate. Here, the artist connects ancient metaphysical epistemologies to the cosmos by seeing the mauve hues of the crown chakra in NASA photographs that capture the color of the universe.

Exploring the depths of the human psyche, Reveles also looked to events from recent human history. For this series, the artist took tracings from a visit to the Risiera di San Sabba concentration camp in Trieste, Italy. Reveles maps out his compositions with measuring devices that he shapes from wood following tracings he takes from referents existing in the artist’s environment. Originally setting out to find trees in the internment camp to trace but finding that there were none, Reveles resorted to tracing the walls and floors of the camp’s bunker rooms, registering missing chunks of plaster and the unevenness of the floor. While the artist hones his attention on specific atrocities, the psychic stakes of these works reverberate throughout human history and into our present. The dynamic lines of Reveles’ compositions carry affective registers of the soul, vibrating with a consciousness that ties us all together through time and space.

Sam Reveles (b. El Paso, Texas), earned his M.F.A. in painting from Yale University. Throughout his career, Reveles has explored the expressive possibilities of line and space to create abstract responses to familiar visual stimuli. In the early years, these stimuli were master paintings from the canon of art history. For the past decade, Reveles has drawn inspiration from the landscapes to which he is intimately connected. Over the course of his career, Reveles has participated in many important solo and group exhibitions, such as the prestigious Whitney Biennial in 1995. Most recently, he was featured in a solo exhibition at the Butler Gallery, the non-profit contemporary art space of Kilkenny Castle in Ireland. Reveles has had solo exhibitions at the El Paso Museum of Art; the Saint Louis Art Museum; the Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston; and the Hammer Art Museum in Los Angeles. The artist’s paintings are also included in the permanent museum collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Dallas Museum of Art, the Saint Louis Art Museum, the El Paso Museum of Art, and the Centro de Arte Contemporaneo in Mexico City. He was recently awarded a residency at the Ballinglen Arts Foundation in Ballycastle, Ireland. He currently lives and works in County Wicklow, Ireland.