Logan Sylve's Diamond Dusted Edition at Chase Contemporary

Presenting a dazzling (literally) artist edition by artist, Logan Sylve, in collaboration with Chase Contemporary. Guitar Sounds, Sylve's first-ever solo exhibition opened this week at the gallery, and this special print edition was also dropped to accompany it.

Sylve, who over the rich span of his artistic career, has become recognized by his unique figures — oftentimes characterized by their ghoulish expressions and visceral anatomy that verges on body horror. Garish grins and manic eyes on both human, animal, and all in-between can be seen in his paintings and compositions. While figurative, there is a clear sense of the surreal. His figures are animated through warped posturing and expression as if moving between different states of being: motion and stillness, life and death.

The print we produced the edition for, titled No Patience, is part of Sylve's 'pink' series that lends its focus to the concept of metamorphosis, and in particular, skinning down to one's innermost forms and skeletal selves. Floating eyes held together in a dark web of matter that should look like an Eldritch horror are glorified in shimmering diamonds. This print is the "be not afraid" of all editions we have had the pleasure to work on so far... even its media proving to be both a stunning but fearful material to handle.

The image is taken from an existing painting of Sylve's that was scanned and turned into a digital file. The original artwork also used a dry material like diamond dust in its grey area, but in its translation to a print, we were directed to retouch several areas of the work to make the diamond dusted area of the print solid and flat. Each print was done via our archival printers, on Hahnemühle German Etching paper, before it was silkscreened, and then dusted with fine synthetic diamond dust crystals.

For those who may be unfamiliar, synthetic diamond dust crystals are a dry filler additive, typically made from crushed glass, that can be added to wet pigments and other viscous media to produce a shimmering, 3-dimensional affect. The particular crystals we ordered for the No Patience edition come in a grain and mil finer and smaller than what is regularly sold, and also required elevated safety standards and protocols during production. We used silkscreen to lay down an accurate, even application of transparent gloss to act as the glue binder for the diamond dust crystals to stick to the print, so this was a multiple-step process. After prints were left to dry over a few days, each one was hand-deckled on all 4 edges to produce the final result.

Exhibition photos taken by and courtesy of Chase Contemporary. All artwork courtesy of the artist, Logan Sylve.