Silent Night" by Scott Kahn at David Zwirner

Clouds that seem to come alive, lunar landscapes charged with foreboding, and bare trees electrified by unexpected colors populate Scott Kahn's canvases in this solo exhibition at David Zwirner. Over more than five decades dedicated to figurative painting, the artist has built his own formal language to capture, simultaneously, the splendor and banality of the everyday world—and "Silent Night" brings together new and recent paintings focused precisely on the landscape genre, always present in his work. His enigmatic compositions mix real and surreal elements, almost replicas of lived experience crossed by electric color or ghostly shadows, with seasons and times of day often overlapping within the same canvas. As writer and poet John Yau observed, before a Kahn painting, we begin to see ourselves seeing a world that, despite so many precise details, remains indecipherable—like a beautiful box that cannot be opened.