Chase Hall is a young, self-taught artist living in New York, and one of America’s most exciting rising talents. His parents separated when he was young, and he grew up with two siblings and a single mom. His mother moved the family many times and across fantastic distances during his childhood: Las Vegas, Minnesota, Dubai, Malibu (where his love of surfing began).
Relocating so often as a youngster, Hall experienced the dislocation of impermanence in both nuanced and frank ways.
Temporary housing and broad distances between periods of domestic stability, coupled with the tensions of meeting new friends and experiencing racial stereotyping (Hall’s mother is white and his father is Black), often resulted in Hall being made to feel neither adequately Black nor white in various settings. These repeating patterns of transience and relocation may have sparked in the young artist a deep interest in the liminal spaces a person can inhabit, in both physical and emotional terms—between family members past and present, between places and races.
While attending high school in Malibu, Hall fell in with a crew of skaters and surfers, and it may have been the time he spent in the water during this period that also brought him to something of an epiphany about his own personal context: The ocean is an equalizer in every sense of the word. It is both disabling and empowering to us all.
Hall possesses a painting style that is distinctly his own, born of long hours in the studio following impulses, listening to music (a lot of it jazz), and allowing for intuitive trust, in lieu of formal training. Early on in his career, he gorged on Manhattan’s museum and gallery exhibitions, covering miles of the city on foot, taking it all in. During that time, he often asked for strangers’ permission to photograph them on the street and eventually made a series of short films that document similar encounters, yielding disarmingly vibrant snapshots of life in America.
Accompanied by a titular soundtrack, his films, walk around (2016) and your smile (2017), seem to be stitched snippets of videoed first encounters with daylit New Yorkers who each find a way to impart a palpable sense of character, pulse, and place. Strangers observed from a distance reveal the countless personal narratives awash in the currents of Manhattan’s streets. Hall’s camera stays locked on his subjects’ faces long enough to witness the blossom (and wither) of a requested smile. In many of these faces, a glimmer of radiant joy is revealed, if only for an instant, and the connection is made with the viewer. (And with Hall, of course, too.) An awkward self-consciousness also blooms in the second half of these moments, and we witness the drawing of these curtains, closing again across the windows to these souls, just as the raking light of the city thrusts these folks out of and into the shadows.
When Hall turns to painting, which he does with gusto, he continues to present us with images of distinct connection: to the human soul, found in the countenances of his figures; to nature, as surfers and bathers bond with the sea in images approaching copulation; and to the past, with histories full of pride and full of pain.
Hall uses brewed coffee as one of his primary art materials and has found a palette of varying skin and background tonalities based on different coffee types and brewing methods. This is no stunt: As a teenager working at Starbucks, Hall began experimenting with coffee, using it as a type of paint on scraps of paper and napkins. When he began to paint in earnest on larger canvas formats, a conceptual grounding for his art practice began to assert itself. Coffee, with its origins in Africa, has a troubled history. The canvas painting support is made entirely of cotton. American cotton production is at the very center of its agrarian origin story—one created with African slave labor.
Hall seeks to acknowledge that legacy, and in his work are countless passages where there is only the white canvas showing through. In some ways, Hall’s paintings recall a type of coloring-
book muscle memory where shapes to be colored in will congeal into a picture. Except here, the shapes are not completely colored in. He leaves areas of white around his many shapes and forms, and these “spaces between” take on an importance that is essential to reading his work.
Hall does not paint with white. Rather, he leaves these negative spaces, as they are known, to function as allegorical and pictorial tooling. Leaving so many negative spaces in the work adds a mosaic-like quality to the paintings that, grafted to the form of a person, might suggest that a human being is a fragmented thing, always evolving, and that the absence of a unified cohesion is consistent with the predicament of living in the present and trying to understand one’s self. More specific to the artist himself are allusions to a biracial reality and a liminal state between races where color can be both defining and elastic.
The picture is mythical, creationist, and physically enormous.
The Bathers is a recent series of ambitious paintings that depict, explore, and celebrate time spent in the water. They are frankly spectacular—massive in scale and chromatically dazzling. The paintings share a heroic and historic quality that speaks to canonical works of art and literature, where engagement with the sea is at once all-defining for the individual and a universal lesson in existential potential for us all. The series calls to mind Romare Bearden’s masterpiece, A Black Odyssey (1977), which retells the Homeric tale in a series of collages where its heroes are constructed of black paper cutouts, irrevocably reimagining the aesthetic of the narrative while asserting the universality of the human quest for self-realization through adventurous trial. Odysseus’ extraordinary life, we will remember, is brought to him while he is navigating the sea.
Surfers will recognize in Hall’s paintings the portraits and vistas of their own Californian forebears, whose exploits and images are now bedrock genesis stories of a culture. Hall
engages these histories with a new vision: His heroes are not blond-haired and blue-eyed. Instead, they are coffee brown, and this divergence from the dominant narrative we are so familiar with raises difficult questions about life in America for people of color—of coastal access, or, more fundamentally, of access and inclusion in a culture of leisurely adventure.
There is a lot of joy in Hall’s pictures, too. Nine Month Swell (2023), for example, shows a man and a woman emerging from the ocean. The man’s head is cast down a little as he tugs along a massive surfboard seemingly made of heavy wood. His countenance is determined, his physique god-like. The woman clutches his arm, her face relaxed and trusting, her breasts mashed expressively together. Taken as one, the figures exemplify the fecundity of an origin story. In fact, it appears that the couple is being birthed by the mother goddess of the sea. Behind their forms and the crashing waves, nine suns float across the horizon, each one larger than the next, the ninth shimmering with third-trimester movement. (Months after the completion of this work, Hall and his wife would celebrate the birth of their first child, a daughter.)
In Mother Nature (2023), a man gently caresses the snout of a massive breaching orca, missile-like in ascendant glory. All around the composition, birds swoop and swoon. The picture is mythical, creationist, and physically enormous at almost 8 feet in height. The sea mammal and the land mammal, sky-bound among the birds with the horizon well below them, are at once entirely at union with the natural world and between all of its planes. Here, Hall is showing us in heroic terms how distances between planes of existence at the elemental and philosophical level are possibly much smaller than we think, that polarities can cohabitate.
Another of Hall’s large maritime paintings, The Ocean’s Floor (2021), shows a deep-sea diver, leaded shoes in the sand, enveloped by an immense purple octopus whose every sentient limb is wrapped around him. The diver’s umbilical air hose floats nearby. At his feet is a massive ship’s anchor, erect and gleaming. The octopus is eyeing the steel of the anchor while holding fast to the diver. It is not entirely clear if the diver and the octopus are in combat or implied coitus. The octopus might represent the intelligent transformative potential of mankind, of self-determination, introspection, and adaptability—of being more than one thing in a life, as it clings to its partner.
A very different view of things materializes in the stunning painting The Great White Hanging (2020), where a Black fisherman poses with the corpse of his triumphant catch: a huge and glistening shark that wears an expression of toothy shock. Literature has shown that these types of scenes can be existential matters: Ahab and his white whale, Santiago and his mangled marlin. It’s the search for meaning and masculine power and agency, a classic romantic view of opportunistic potential represented by a natural world laid bare at the feet of a protagonist, adventure and self-discovery calling, everything ripe for the taking.
These are also narratives at play that are traditionally unavailable to people of color in the United States. In Hall’s painting, there exists another deftly handled reversal: The unassuming fisherman has literally upended a vibrant power symbol (fearful, violent, utter dominance) manifested by the hung shark, perhaps suggesting that the angler has killed his own oppressor and in so doing has rescripted history itself.
Finally, another troubling reality is revealed, one of the ugliest of America’s past: lynching. The gigantic shark is strung up by its tail while tall coils of white rope stand like armament behind the fisherman. The sky is awash in birdlike cloudscapes that seem like darting demons, witnesses to travesty. The knot around the murdered fish’s tail is a white cotton noose. In Between the Face and the Lip (2023), a naked man on a surfboard blazes through the vortex of a deep tube ride, as if being born. It’s an image that every surfer is familiar with, and the prized money shot of a million magazine covers. Our surfer here is distinctly brown as the entire painting is constructed in similar shades: brown coffee swirling up the face of the coffee sea, the sunny horizon visible through the barrel. The surfer’s skin is slick with ochre paint streaks, and he sparkles with athletic tension. The entire painting is crackling with muscular electricity.
This is the vision of clarity that we all are seeking, and something surfers might bear witness to better than anyone else: full-frontal, flow-state consciousness, hurtling bliss and determined self-possession while pitted in swirling chaos. In an image that manages to convey prenatal and postpartum existential visions of what it means to be enveloped by the froth of life, Hall has shown us that one can indeed be between places, within and without, existing as oneself with poise and permanence.
