It seems today there is a common belief, almost to the level of a truism, that it is redundant to make art of reality, or “things as they are.” The attitude is that the artist, if drawing from the world, must improve upon nature, make order out of it, find hidden truths, or conversely, they must strip away any excess to uncover the essence or abstract beauty of a place. Then the artist is admired for their interpretation of reality.

But if you were to consider the breadth, and also constraints, of your experience in a particular place, including what is unique to your body, what do you see? How would you put that experience down on canvas? How would color as life force translate into color as material? How would you convey a moving object, a sound, or a half-formed thought in that moment? Whatever the outcome, redundancy never enters the picture.

A descendant of Cézanne’s “objectivity without sacrificing subjectivity, the landscape thinks itself in me,” Dylan Vandenhoeck is an objective, realist painter whose work includes the full bodily context of an encounter with the world. In that sense, any perceived ‘artistic interpretation’ could be considered a byproduct of his desire to reach towards the real, a material friction, and most importantly a result of reality being an open-ended encounter with an ever-changing world, rather than a fixed image to be interpreted.

The 15 works featured in Inside Out, Outside In all depict different locations in the greater New York area, specifically the surroundings of Vandenhoeck’s studio in Dobbs Ferry. Most of the paintings were done on site, or en plein air, on a scale intended to mimic the body, and “also happens to be the largest I can fit in my car,” says the artist. Vandenhoeck uses various other means to aid in observational painting, including voice memos, notes, sketches, photo and video references, especially to capture dimensions of experience that are unfeasible for the never-fast-enough act of painting on site.

For Vandenhoeck, painting offers a sense of deep space, or a portal more akin to lived reality than anything belonging to the image world. The finished paintings possess a rhythmic cycling between artwork and artifact that echo the inner and outermost entanglement of the artist and their relationship to the world. As philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty wrote in Phenomenology of Perception, “the world is wholly inside, and I am wholly outside of myself.”

Dylan Vandenhoeck (b. 1990; New York) is a painter and musician living in New York. He received his BFA from The Cooper Union in 2012 and MFA in Visual Art from Columbia University in 2017. Recent solo exhibitions include Reality Show at Matthew Brown, Los Angeles (2021) and What Do You See When You Close Your Eyes and Nod Yes? at Jack Barrett, New York (2020.) Recent group exhibitions include High Art (Paris), Downs & Ross (New York), Office Baroque at Art Brussels (Brussels), The FLAG Art Foundation (New York), and Klaus Von Nichtssagend Gallery (New York). He was a recipient of the 2017 Rema Hort Mann Emerging Artist Grant and most recently was a fellow in Shandaken Projects' "Paint School", a color discussion group. His work is in the collection of the X Museum, Beijing.