Kate Robinson Fine Art is pleased to announce “Private Cosmogony,” a solo show of approximately 20 works on paper by the Anglo-American artist Alex Asher Daniel. Taking its title from Antonin Artaud’s 1925 prose poem, “The Nerve Meter,” in which Artaud writes that “Nothing but a fine Nerve Meter” could possibly register the private cosmogony of an artist, “A kind of incomprehensible stopping place in the mind, right in the middle of everything,” this series of Daniels’ works is about the calibration of such a Nerve Meter. Indeed, each of these new works functions as a finely balanced equation, weighing detail and abstraction, positive and negative space, movement and stasis.

These works are apparently figurative. Bodies emerge from a multitude of floating lines and colors, suspended in the air in mid-gesture, set against the empty stage of white paper. Or, as Artaud would have it, Daniels’ figures are “sucked into life by the space that offered itself.” And Daniel is keenly interested in the white space of these works: “I enjoy what a painting says in its empty spaces… there is a lot going on in the negative space of my work, although I’m not sure if anyone else can see it.” The push and pull of empty and painted spaces in these works, within and beyond the figures themselves, lies at the heart of Daniels’ project. These precisely calibrated interstices are the marks of Daniels’ Nerve Meter—visible or not. They hint at his Private Cosmogony.