CODY TUMBLIN | I Would Like to Step Out of My Heart | January 5 – February 8, 2025
In this intimate exhibition of new paintings by Cody Tumblin, the Chicago artist presents a body of work gently tethered to the miraculous. Throughout his career, Tumblin has described abstraction as a tool to bind the natural world to the spiritual, situating his work within a lineage of artists such as Hilma af Klint, Etel Adnan, Paul Klee, and others. Functionally, his paintings act as reliquaries, dedicating themselves to singular subjects that are embraced and celebrated by dense, colorful collages. Each image is cobbled together through a slow and meticulous assembly of cut and painted forms—often scraps and remnants torn from other paintings or found textiles. Slow and attentive eyes are rewarded with painted threads or bright pigments peeking out from beneath the edges of stars, hearts, and creeping vines.
Cody Tumblin’s solo exhibition, “I Would Like to Step Out of My Heart,” at Devening Projects envelops viewers in tactility and sentimentality. Charming and bittersweet, the painting and collage works hover throughout the space as vignetted peeks into the artist’s material and theoretical psyche. His references to foliage intertwining with cutout circles, stars, moons, suns, and hearts are his conceptual touchstones. These signifiers coincide with pigment stains, grids, stripes, material strata, variably thick and minuscule paint strokes, and scattering applications of paint and paper. ¶ The quasi-diptych paintings Hole in the Sky (Some Where) and Weal or Woe sneakily announce themselves. Angled views reveal the layers of collage protruding slightly. The dirt-brown pigment, scrubbed into vinelike textures, entwines with superimposed cutout hearts that oscillate between tension and resolution. These gestures get to the heart (sorry, I know) of it: edges of form and feeling, where the surface becomes a repository of wonder. — Samuel Schwindt, “Lost Whimsy” exhibition review for the Chicago Reader
Tumblin’s palette dances between the celebratory and the melancholic, often emulating soft light or a darkened night sky. Color is not only a formal device but a resonant voice, one that leans toward contemplative introspection rather than unrestrained optimism. Grids and stripes echo the fragile construction of order and stability, reflecting a human condition that is both tenuous and delicate despite its beauty. At times, his spatial structures feel pictorial; at others, they unfold across flat planes, evoking a sense of instability and complexity.
Cody Tumblin’s work invites viewers to see the world as a place ripe with possibility and tenderness, even amid its frequent darkness. The show’s title, I Would Like to Step Out of My Heart, borrowed from Rilke’s 1918 poem “Lament”, echoes a longing to transcend the depths of sorrow and connect with something greater. Tumblin’s paintings propose that the ordinary often holds the sacred and that the unnoticed may carry the potential for the miraculous.
