Essay Excerpt from Highway Catalog

Read an excerpt from the essay by Jeffry Cudlin: 

"Unfamiliar Territory "    By Jeffry Cudlin 

Gregory Thielker must love getting lost. Given his fastidious nature and his predilection for creating detailed, hyper-real paintings and drawings, one might expect that the artist would prefer a controlled, familiar work environment. Undoubtedly Mr. Thielker could develop a fine oeuvre just by focusing on the confines of his studio and his own backyard. After all, generations of gifted painters have stayed close to their native lands: from Constable, forever depicting the strip of Suffolk County where he was born and raised; to Cezanne, training his eye on Mont Sainte-Victoire and his home in Aix en Provence. 

But at every opportunity, Mr. Thielker has thrown himself into the far-flung and unfamiliar. From plein air painting at twilight in the snow and ice along Norway’s Gamle Strynefjellsveg, to residencies and special projects in El Salvador and Bagram, Afghanistan, Mr. Thielker has routinely packed up his tools and traveled for long stretches of time in places where the language, the climate, and the terrain have been entirely alien, if not forbidding. The result is a body of work buzzing with intense, heightened perceptions, yet confronting the viewer with reticent, unsentimental images that defy easy narrative associations. 

For "Highway", his recent project as a Fulbright scholar in India, the artist set out to systematically record dramatic changes along the Grand Trunk Road—South Asia’s longest and oldest road, dating back to the 16th century. The 918-mile portion of the route that connected Delhi and Kolkata has in recent years been transformed into National Highway 2, a sleek four-lane superhighway carrying speeding cars through sleepy villages. The road now embodies the contradictions of a country hungry for modernity but still defined by its ancient traditions, ramshackle infrastructure, and poverty. 

While working on the project, Mr. Thielker behaved more like a researcher or amateur ethnographer than a painter’s painter. With the help of interpreters, the artist recorded interviews with truck drivers, schoolteachers, and random passers-by, asking questions about how the new road impacted their communities—and often receiving unexpected or inscrutable responses. In the eyes of those who live near it, either the road will change everything…or it is emblematic of how nothing in India will ever really change..."

Jeffry Cudlin is a writer, artist, curator, and professor of curatorial studies at Maryland Institute College of Art.