Warm Worm World

People of Earth, it’s true what you’ve heard: we are lucky to have been visited by the paintings from Nate Luce’s dreamy, yummy, profoundly beautiful Warm Worm World, and they come in peace. They come in a variety of strange, soft colors like slug pink and halo yellow and dad red and good, good green; they come in different sizes and dimensions and notions of what even is dimension; they come in textural presentations so playful and yet so quietly contemplative you want to reach out and touch faith. You want to pick them up and hoist them in the air like sails, like signs, like windows.

The paintings in this collection gesture across temporality, gently suggesting life beyond what we understand to be living. They communicate something like feedback from the ethereal channel between the here and the there, the great big beyond, and nevertheless even the static noise is crystally clear like river water, or like baby’s tears. These paintings are visions. These paintings are transmissions, messages, lessons, sometimes directly incorporating text like something like spiritual dictation, poetry. The titles, too, are poetry: gorgeous little narratives that lend additional dimension and relay ideas of death, grief, growth, transcendence.

And transcendence is a vital energy here. There is real heart and soul in Luce’s work, and the soul is at once old and new, a necessary interruption in the time-space continuum itself as Warm Worm World floats through form and formlessness. There are figures, sure, and there are shapes, but these paintings don’t abide by any one law of physics, cousins though they are to one another’s centrifugal forces. There is a kind of literal lightness that bounces off these pieces’ varied textural surfaces; the paintings are bioluminescent in this way, as well as they are confounding in the tensions they summon regarding gravity, or what the show’s title painting seems to flirt between: heights as well as depths.

Nate Luce’s work is incredibly, wonderfully generous in its tendency toward this radiant solemnity, this exercise in annunciation. This show invites the viewer to question the very narrative of mortal life, to challenge linearity, logic, all without pretension, without intimidation. Through allusion and reference to other work, to other stories, Warm Worm World moves us like a friend. We are made to feel welcome and whole, even in the multitudes we Whitmanly contain. Thus, refreshingly, we are flush with comfort here when we are told: "I just want you to know no matter what you do you’re gonna die, just like everybody else!” Damn, this is a good feeling. Heaven and hell and Earth and grief and love and pain and beauty and wilderness: we are in this together.

-Chelsea Harlan