Creating disarmingly plausible scenes resonant with an implacable otherness, Los Angeles-based artist Jack Hoyer observes a world that very well might be, but is not. Beginning with a visual idea, the artist sets about capturing similar images, digitally stitching them into a hyper-believable whole devoid of any concretely identifying information. Believing that so much of the meaning of a painting is embedded in its’ composition, Hoyer works with multiple photographs of his own, often spending weeks constructing and fine tuning the composition in his computer. He then grids that composition onto canvas, rendering it cell-by-cell in applications of thin oil paint applied alla prima (wet-on-wet), the Impressionists’ preferred method. Working from the composite image and a skeletal sketch on primed canvas, Hoyer meticulously and faithfully records the contrived.

A realist–decidedly not a photorealist–Hoyer avoids gratuitous texturizations and shoehorned sensuousness, preferring frank legibility and its’ resultant immediacy. Abundant and generous, his pictures take care not to confuse directness with terseness; they continuously reveal themselves to the viewer using the interplay of the painted surface and its’ white oil ground. The ground provides  luminosity. Unifying the canvas, that inner light contributes to a vibrational, all-over hum, or life that further distinguishes Hoyer’s paintings from photorealism.

Jack Hoyer was born in 1946 in Philadelphia and lived there until age 10, after which he spent the rest of his childhood in Yardley, PA. Hoyer began his studies at Haverford College in the fall of 1964 and graduated in 1972 with a BA in psychology, while also earning a BFA from Temple University’s Tyler School of Art in 1970. His works have been the subject of solo exhibitions at Moskowitz Bayse in Los Angeles, and has been included in group presentations at NADA Miami and EXPO Chicago with the gallery. He lives and works in Los Angeles, CA.