Scott Kahn: Once in a Blue Moon

The exhibition takes its title from a 2023 painting, Blue Moon, that features the silvery orb of the full moon seemingly in the midst of merging with a blue-toned doppelgänger. As a lunar phenomenon, a blue moon refers to the occurrence of two full moons in one calendar month, an event that comes around every two to three years, though the term itself originated from the sixteenth-century expression “The moon is blue,” meant to convey something so outlandish as to be impossible.

In his new works, Kahn cannily plays with the chromatic implications of this phrase, presenting moonscapes that unfold as near facsimiles of lived experience but that are shot through with electric color or ghostly shadows that pull the viewer into another realm. A pair of related small-scale compositions, Blue Moon II and Sunset Behind the Privet Hedge, seem to zoom in on elements of the larger Blue Moon painting, carefully reworking them in order to tease out new formal possibilities and thus evoke distinct responses.

In another recent work, Wolf Moon, Kahn divides the canvas roughly in half, essentially creating two interlocking but independent compositions that each inform the other in turn. The wolf moon—the year’s first full moon, so named for the howling wolves that are said to emerge in January to hunt for food—hangs low, its large form seemingly floating in the center of the dark, starless night sky in the top portion of the composition. Below, a field of bare trees rendered in crimson and dashes of blue stretches into the distance, establishing a sense of depth that reinforces the illusion of the hovering moon.

Kahn conceptualizes space in a different way in the painting Spring Moon, made a decade earlier, in 2013, which features a faraway moon veiled by cloud cover. Glimpsed through a clearing in a thicket of trees, Kahn utilizes a symmetrical composition to build a sensation of vast and receding depth across the flat picture plane, casting the orb as both ominously present and just out of reach.

Also on view are two significant large-scale early works from the 1980s that speak to both the consistency and the evolution of Kahn’s painterly inquiry. The Cliffs at Stoke Fleming IV belongs to an important series of works from 1987 that features the picturesque English countryside with fog rolling in over the verdant outcroppings. At center, a small and mysterious opening suggests a portal to another world.

Finally, The Card Game bridges Kahn’s landscapes and his portraits, loosely evoking the composition of Leonardo da Vinci’s The Last Supper. The artist himself sits in the middle of a long table, hands outstretched to reveal four upturned playing cards—which, read in sequence, give Kahn’s birthdate—and flanked by two male figures gazing in different directions.

Behind the table, an idyllic tripartite landscape extends the space of the painting, though it is unclear if the scene is glimpsed through a window or reproduced in a painting. Mimicking the construction of an altarpiece, Kahn’s trompe l’oeil paradise encapsulates many of the key themes of his practice, existing on the precipice between the real and the imagined.