John Eric Byers: Squares and Rectangles

March 28 - April 26 at Gallery NAGA

John Eric Byers, now in his mid-forties, is the most lauded studio furniture maker of his generation and also perhaps the most active.  Focusing his energy on his studio and choosing not to teach, Byers has produced scores of private commissions and twenty-one solo exhibitions between 1991 and 2006, including a mid-career retrospective in 2004 at the Fuller Craft Museum in Brockton, Massachusetts.

His twenty-second show, Squares and Rectangles, which opens March 28 at Gallery NAGA, presents his newest work, in which the forms of his wall cabinets, tables, and “carved paintings” are more than ever reduced to essential geometries and also more than ever completely covered with complex carving.

The works are both calm and intense - precise, minimalist forms whose surfaces bristle with the varying colors and light revealed and reflected by the thousands upon thousands of gouged marks on every face.  Close inspection shows that these marks themselves describe tiny geometries.  On each wall-hung cabinet, on each small table, carved lines form squares and rectangles that cover every surface, like sleeve tattoos covering entire arms. 

Byers says there are 8,000 to 12,000 squares and rectangles on each of these pieces, an achievement even more impressive in light of his two shoulder surgeries in 2005 and 2006, one on each shoulder, each needing six months of rehab.  The time off was buoyed in part by two 2005 awards, from the New York Foundation of the Arts and from the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation, which had in the past honored only studio furniture makers quite older than Byers.

He bounced back with two solo shows in 2006, in New York and Philadelphia, in which the movement toward the present distillation to the simplest, “purest” shapes began, almost entirely in his buttermilk-and-snow palette.  A 2007 carved black painting was presented in a group show at NAGA and elicited great enthusiasm, which encouraged him to make the dazzling black furniture that debuts here this month.