Passages, Christopher Hart Chambers's current solo at Crossing Art, NYC

 
Fertile Circus, 2024 oil on canvas 60 x 72 in, photo credit, Shayomi Srivastava

By ROBERT CURCIO March 4, 2025

Walking along West 23 Street on a cold January night, I stopped on the sidewalk under a bright light from the building and looked down at a long, dimly lit entrance hall to a door with a vertically narrow window where I could see a large bright yellow vine. The vine was perfectly framed in the window, and the whole scene was somewhat surreal and a little spooky. It conjured reminiscences of a scene from an old film noir, and I am the protagonist. As in a dream, I carefully traverse the dark hallway, open the door, and walk into the bright white cube to face Christopher Hart Chambers’ Fertile Circus, a painting in his current solo exhibition entitled Passages at Crossing Art in Chelsea until March 11.

With my focus on the vibrant yellow vine, my eyes, if not my whole body, fall into the lattice of overlapping layers of vines, branches, flowers, wisps of clouds, shapes, colors, negative space, and more. All of this is crammed into every one of Chambers’ paintings; however, their vastness goes way beyond the physical boundaries of the surface and edges of the paintings. You can enter this expanse in numerous ways and become lost in them – the paintings are an adventure, as Chambers says.

Once you are immersed, you encounter still more vines that are delicate, wavy green vertical vines with the tiniest red and pink flowers. Defiantly blocking further passage is a layer of nearly all-black tree trunks with deep red petals. Poking out behind the tree trunks, curvy lavender vines and flowers dance across all the verticality. Seemingly behind the black trees are vertical bands of yellow ochre while peering through all of this way in the background, Chambers barely hints at a landscape with some vague greens and blues.  As you step back from the painting, you see these thin horizontal veils of lavender and turquoise captured for a fleeting second as they travel along.

Fertile Circus, 2024 oil on canvas 60 x 72 in, photo credit, Shayomi Srivastava
 

Chambers creates a maximal collage of references to botanical illustrations, textiles, Hannah Barbera cartoon stills, Donald Sultan, Alex Katz, Matisse, Asian arts, and his own observations of the little bits of nature found throughout the city. I would even include in this mix Warhol’s Flowers and, oddly enough, Ellsworth Kelly’s early plant drawings, which are a line that carries weight and nuance, much like Chambers’ vines and tree trunks. Once you truly investigate your surroundings, you see brushstrokes, the paint is thick and other areas are translucent, edges of branches are slightly imperfect, and additional techniques highlight Chambers’ presence. And the colors are so alluring. Getting up close to a black trunk, you notice that the black is not black but the darkest possible green straight from the tube.

Further into the exhibit, just past the front desk and before a few steps up to the main gallery, is a collection of small paintings. The painting at the top right, Lonely Afternoon, is not only wonderful but surprisingly emotional, unlike most other paintings. Again, there is a central element of three cartoon-looking trees in opaque black-brown with noticeable brushstrokes and large pale slate-blue leaves. In front of the central tree and its leaves, thin and delicate wavy vines and leaves in an even paler slate-blue are behind a series of what appear to be haphazard translucent brown dots down the center. These brown dots at the forefront relate to nearly see-through brownish vines and leaves behind the trees. And off in the distance is a glowing blurry sky of yellows, blues, and foreboding dark reds. The central tree “figure” is dark and wrapped by pale vines that hold the tree, a sense of consolation or reprieve, all to keep the world at bay.

 Lonely Afternoon, 2024, oil on canvas 27 x 18 in, photo credit, Shayomi Srivastava

Stepping up into the main space is Balustrade, perhaps the best painting in the exhibition, but in conflict with itself. There is this slyness to it; it seems simple and direct enough, but underneath it all, you just wander into a whole lot happening. Dangling from the top edge is a single curving vine with flowers all in a near-black with red centers for the flowers. Something about that vine is not quite as inviting as the yellow vine encountered at the entrance.  Strung out horizontally behind the sole vine are little vines and petals in a drab olive-green color. The following layer of trees is elongated and elegant in a soft cream color with large petals of slate blue with a hazy atmospheric background of blues, yellows, reds, and a touch of olive green. Somewhere floating in between and barely discernable are, this time, vertical veils.

The overwhelming verticality of Balustrade at 64 x 46 inches, with its intense vertical imagery, creates a near-vertigo sensation. This is very different from what the title infers since a balustrade is a set of posts or screens with a bar on top to prevent people from falling over the edge of stairs or a balcony.  The painting is bright and inviting, and the title brings a sense of safety or protection. However, people do fall off balconies in real life as well as in the movies.

The nature of leaves stems, flowers, vines, and stunning colors are but basic props Chambers has skillfully manipulated with his blend of techniques to create an enchanted forest that, as you wander through it, is filled with delightful beauty and a smattering of the sinister. WM