Orange Silk Blues at Zepster Gallery

Can you handle the seasons?, David Hanes, courtesy of  Zepster Gallery

By CALLA BAI April 20, 2025

Tucked into a little half basement gallery in East Williamsburg, I fell into a world of quiltwork color. Zepster Gallery, which opened in May of 2024, is not merely the quirky little sibling of the white walled establishments conveniently gridded across Chelsea, the Upper East Side, or Soho. It is alive in its own right, obliging your attention as you meticulously navigate on Google Maps through the steely chambers of industrial fabricators and waste managers of New York City. On an opening night, it exhales a warm glow from its half blocked windows, and on a lucky opening night, a part of its exhaust are the intermingling vapors emitted by unpretentious artworks and the tipsy chatter of recent art school grads who, much like you, were journeying to this gallery just moments before. 

The night I describe paints an accurate picture of the opening of “Orange Silk Blues,” Zepster’s recent show featuring the works of Andrew Hildenbrand and David Hanes. Both younger painters, Hildenbrand and Hanes paint surfaces featuring patchworks of vibrating color that modulate the environments both depicted and surrounding. Their lines are somewhat colloquial; their harmony sublime. 

Hanes’s work depicts landscapes painted from plein air sketches; they start as observational drawings executed on site where light refracts off the environment, enters the eye and then the mind, and is subsequently gestured by the hand holding oil pastel to paper. The paintings we see are images further processed and filtered; they are but another degree removed. If the original sketch indexes the desire of the artist to capture a moment worth remembering, the paintings born in Hanes’s studio deliver a memory well aged. A swampy pond happened upon is retold in ribbons of neon yellow and green, while the sky above reflects the finger-like strokes in a zebraing yellow and blue. I glanced up at the sky this morning and thought of Hanes’s practice: identifying, parsing, organizing, remembering, reorganizing the matter around him. He makes us not privy to the vistas that graced his line of vision as he was hiking, but rather to their sweetness as they abide in his past. The works on canvas are particularly rich: flora rendered psychedelic in thick strokes of oil, fluffed by the tuft of his brush, each color saturated so that they interlock like fuzzy jigsaws.  

Installation view of Odds and Ends and Channels, Andrew Hildenbrand, courtesy of Zepster Gallery

Hildenbrand patches together swathes of color too, though in a manner more meditative, and contemplative. Where Hanes’s pictures draw us from the environment into a memorial world, Hildenbrand lays bare a musing line of thought before dousing it in color once, twice, then into the realm of countless iteration until the work itself is abuzz, and the air surrounding with it. 

You can see the accumulating sediment with a closer look. Pink shimmers under gray shimmers under an icy blue; I thought that maybe if I sliced a work in half there would be layers and layers, the deepest one dating back to times ancient and primordial. A speck of dust ripples under its many coats of paint until it is a little “chromatic goose pimple,” a provocative image that lives in the artist’s Instagram bio. I can swear I see his casual lines tremble as the crowd’s din begins to swell.  

Some of Hildenbrand’s works dabble with language: a slant cross earns the title in Leaning T, a backwards “P” tangles with a parabola in Odds and Ends, curved pipes misdirect our eye towards Channel. How these forms overlay, disrupt, and hook on in the otherwise even graphing of the composition exacerbate the works’ vibratory surfaces. Hildenbrand, an avid reader and writer of poetry, treats his forms as he does his words, vessels headed towards inconclusive ends, brimming with potential for fabulation to any who are willing to pause. 

Installation view of Through your eyes, I see by David Hanes and Leaning T by Andrew Hildenbrand, courtesy of Zepster Gallery

A mythic language arises too from Hanes’s paintings. In Can I handle the seasons?, the fuschia brush sprouting amongst the grasses takes the form of scratchy letters. What subconscious message is emerging from this otherwise impenetrable landscape? Lexical scrawl fills the atmosphere of Through your eyes, I see, a title playfully describing our own viewing vis a vis Hanes. Between the two, neither artist leaves room for us to disengage; there’s not a millimeter of negative space for our eye to skip over and rest.

Hanes’s prose beside Hildenbrand’s poetry tell of two artists who yearn for a sylvan utopia, the former spending seasons hiking and sketching across European idylls, while the latter writes of cross-country road trips, seeking out mountains and lakes. Amongst the leaden walls and asphalt of the neighborhood, one might read “Orange Silk Blues” as something of an escape, a rural refreshment contrasting the surrounding grit. Perhaps they represent a subconscious or even waking vision of life unencumbered by crowds, unfiltered air, and skyscraper shadows. Yet how at home is this expression of longing in a place like Zepster Gallery, where a mass so easily gathers to share in such visions, in a city where patches of urban grown grass are sprawled upon if the wind softens its bite. The “blues” of pining for sublimity are not satiated by geographies or visions, though they may be momentarily soothed by a weekend in the woods or a voyage out West. The “blues” seep and leak across the city in many forms: a wailing saxophone busking by the subway turnstile, a graffitied portrait down the street from Zepster, a cluster of daffodils growing in the unpaved square of a sidewalk. The work of Hanes and Hildenbrand leave no stone unturned, layering and marking with a hunger that tells of their own shades of blues. WM