ILY2 is proud to announce The Nights are Now, our upcoming exhibition of new works by Pace Taylor, Taylor’s first exhibition with the gallery, and first solo exhibition in New York. An opening reception will be held on Thursday, May 14th, from 6:00 - 8:00pm

The Nights are Now: Pace Taylor Exhibition at ILY2 New York

For The Nights are Now, Pace Taylor visualizes the instability of grief, in all of its forms. Grief manifests in a multitude of ways; it spins between agony, resignation, relief, and—at times—joy with enough zeal it seems boundless. It produces an all-consuming tension that pushes and pulls the self both psychically and physically, until certainty feels just out of reach. In their new works,Taylor explores this tension, rendering the entropic state of grievance legible.

The painterly quality of Taylor’s drawing is indisputable. Meticulously applied pastel spans the entirety of their compositions, flooding the field in vivid, high-contrast colors that imbue even the most solemn of scenes with vitality. The figures in Taylor’s drawings represent not so much distinct individuals as they do sentiment themselves. They’re often portrayed fractured or in flux: a head is cropped so that only the eyes and nose are visible; a body appears caught at the confluence of human, bird, and canine; a person is suspended mid-frame, their contorted limbs wrapped around their torsoless body; a face cut off at the ear has two mouths caught between a smile and a grimace. Taylor’s gestural linework emphasizes a sense of motion and dynamism. The figures and scenes’ lack of a static state highlights how Taylor associates the dissonance of transitional moments with movement—a quality they perceive as destabilizing, processual, and, at times, mischievous.

These characteristics are amplified by Taylor’s color palette which, in the same vein as the Fauvists and German Expressionists, has less to do with the scene depicted than the emotions it aims to evoke. Highly saturated tones like baby blue and crimson red instantly play on one’s primal desire for visual pleasure. The visceral colors combined with Taylor’s penchant for fluid, sloping strokes guides the eye through the confines of each drawing, pulling the gaze both inwards and outwards.

The show title, The Nights are Now, as well as the names of many of the paintings are borrowed from Sharon Van Etten’s music, which provided the soundtrack for much of Taylor’s time in the studio. Additional nods are made throughout the show to painters such as R.B. Kitaj, specifically his piece The Wedding (1989-1993), and Rick Bartow, who have been of significant influence to the show’s creation.

There is no punctum in Taylor’s drawings, no singular point of focus that demands all of our attention. Rather it’s the entirety of the plane, the amalgamation of bits and twists, the cacophony of disparate colors that express the vastness and complexity of the human experience.

Pace Taylor (b. 1992) lives and works in Kingston, NY. They received their BFA in Digital Arts from the University of Oregon (2015), and have since shown their work internationally, including at Nationale (Portland, OR), Double V Gallery (Paris, FR), and La Loma Projects (Los Angeles, CA). They have participated in the Ford Family Foundation’s Golden Spot Residency at Caldera, Tropical Contemporary’s Transformation Residency, Centrum’s Emerging Artist Residency, and received an Individual Artist Fellowship from the Oregon Arts Commission in 2022. In 2023, they were awarded the Don Bachard Fellowship by the Christopher Isherwood Foundation to study at the Royal Drawing School of London.