Tyler Park Presents is pleased to present Black Florals, the gallery’s second solo exhibition with Los Angeles-based artist Henri Paul Broyard. The exhibition explores a new body of work that returns to the floral still life, which has been a subject the artist has explored throughout his career, but never to this degree. For Broyard, flowers and plants in interior spaces have historically signified a human interaction, an association he has deliberately avoided in his paintings, gravitating instead toward a more airless, restrained atmosphere.

Broyard’s rendering of the plants in black conjures contemporaries such as Kerry James Marshall and Gary Hume, both of whom deploy black with a graphic, forceful presence. In Marshall's work, a black figure asserts itself against a landscape painted with elegance and reverence with only minimal grey highlighting, as seen in the plants rendered in NBA and UNFT. In Hume's, a flower rendered in thick paint sits in stark contrast to a richly colored ground, as in FG. For Broyard, black has always functioned as an anchor. A color that pulls the eye toward it while articulating the negative space between forms. In this body of work, the plants act as markers of space, positioned between viewer and background, evoking the sensation of looking into a room through a window screen, or the partial, obstructed vision of a dream. 

Working from an archive of personal images, horticultural books, and vintage issues of Sunset Magazine, the works reach into the past in a bibliographical and recollection sense. Broyard's paintings either begin or end in total abstraction. Working abstractly in large blocks of color, grids, and stripes gives the artist an initial point of entry, a way of activating the canvas before a figuration can emerge. At times, when a painting doesn't resolve, Broyard will paint over all recognizable objects, returning the canvas to total abstraction and creating layers of artifacts. In works such as STH, VL and SPSP, the graphic quality of the plant silhouette becomes an anchoring tool among the abstraction layers. The floating leaves in NTD pay homage to the artist's mother, who taught painting and drawing out of a private art studio in Los Angeles. During Broyard's childhood and into his high school years, she would collect leaves and render them life-size with photographic precision in front of her class, demonstrating technique. Broyard and his brother took part in some of these lessons, and several of the finished leaf paintings hung in the family home throughout his upbringing.

The exhibition also continues Broyard's ongoing series of repaired flower pots, a practice that began while living in upstate New York and takes its conceptual root in the Japanese tradition of kintsugi of repairing broken vessels to extend their usefulness while making their history visible. Broyard reinterprets this practice through a distinctly American, brutalist lens, mending the pots with construction adhesive or metal brackets rather than lacquer and gold. Each vessel was sourced individually, already cracked or in pieces; through repair, they are transformed into sculptures and enter a new chapter of their existence.

Henri Paul Broyard (b. 1989 in Los Angeles, CA) received a B.F.A. in Drawing and Painting from the California College of the Arts in 2013. He attended the Klasse Peter Doig at the Kunstakademie, Dusseldorf, in 2014. Broyard has had solo exhibitions at Tyler Park Presents, Los Angeles; 12.26 in Dallas, Texas; Grant Wahlquist Gallery in Portland, Maine; Post Gallery, Zurich; and Foreland in Catskill, New York. Broyard’s work has been included in group exhibitions at venues including: Deli Gallery, New York; Alexander Gray Gallery, New York and Germantown; Essex Flowers, New York; Gern en Regalia, New York; Cindy Rucker Gallery, New York; and Tom Dick or Harry, Dusseldorf, amongst others. His work has been the subject of reviews and publications in ArtNews, the Portland Press Herald, and The Rib. His artwork is held in the collections of museums such as the Portland Museum of Art and the California African American Museum.