Keyes Art in Sag Harbor presents “Watching the Detectives,” the work of Nathan Slate Joseph. The show opens on Saturday, May 6, with a reception from 6 to 8 PM and runs through June 2.
Joseph paints like a sculptor and makes sculptures like a painter. The artist’s paintings occupy more space than a conventional work with heavily pigmented surfaces on galvanized steel.
The sculptures read like facades and require the labor-intensive patience of a bricklayer. Joseph often delineates each smaller rectangle with seams or stitching underscoring a larger grid/pattern.
Joseph uses sky blues, rust oranges, and blood reds. The artist owes his sensibility to the Mediterranean, more precisely the Levant, the area Jews settled in 1492 after expulsion from the Iberian Peninsula.