The Wheatleigh Project

Daniel Kohn's commission for the Wheatleigh hotel, begun in 1997, comprises 15 paintings in both private rooms and public spaces.

These images are drawn from diverse elements of the painters experience, but center on a farm house in the center of France which the painter's family has owned for the past twenty five years and which has increasingly been featured in Kohn's work since 1994.

Two places are here folded into one. Time and space merge. The real space of the newly renovated Wheatleigh hotel and the painted and metaphorical place of the French farmhouse meet. The fabric of building and canvas fold into each other to create multiple layers of experience.

The new Wheatleigh's meeting of classic and contemporary (a modern design within a 19th century copy of a Florentine Palazzo) is echoed within the paintings whose evocation of place embrace both a classical technique and narrative structure, and a strong abstract construction.

Each layer feeds the viewers experience to form a totality far exceeding its constituent parts. As you wander about Wheatleigh and discover its works you will build an image with echoes in your own memory. To each viewer a different totality.

Albert Mark
New York, 2001.