Having launched a line of farm-fresh merch at Dover Street Market earlier this month, artist Dan Colen is back in the big city for his latest Gagosian show. Open today at the gallery’s Upper East Side location, “HELP” is a visual re-route from 2018’s “High Noon,” trading Western-style terra firma for the awesome remoteness of the sea. But Colen, a downtown expat-turned-farmstead proprietor, says his “HELP” seascapes are part of a larger expedition. “For the last five years, all of my paintings [have been] landscapes,” Colen tells us. “This idea of a search—traveling through extended, infinite space—is very much a theme [throughout].”

That exploration, and the resulting works, often mitigate nature’s power with escapist, pop-cultural fodder: In At Least They Died Together (2018), a pendant performance piece for “High Noon,” Colen and choreographer Dmitri Chamblas reenacted the colorful drama of Spaghetti Westerns. But the title, a subtle reference to late friend and artist Dash Snow, pointed to real encounters with mortality: “The performance is meant to be sad and funny at the same time,” Colen recently told photographer and childhood friend Ryan McGinley for V123. “I [had been] consider[ing] all the friends that we’ve lost.” 

Both Colen’s desert- and H20-based landscapes are part of one memory-laden ecology. “Both the desert and the sea can be very violent, vicious places,” he explains. (Two in-progress landscape series, tentatively titled “Purgatory” and “Mother,” deal with sky and sea.) “HELP,” the second landscape series to be shown together, offered the artist unique technical opportunities. “I had a lot of fun with the expressive mark-making that the ocean allowed,” he says. “It’s [a] much more classical [subject].” And while mostly devoid of figures—more Hudson Valley School than Wile E. Coyote—“HELP” drew from animated inspo: according to Gagosian, the message-in-a-bottle motif calls back to The Rescuers, Disney’s 1977 film about a pair of good samaritan mice.

Visually, the critters remain out-of-frame—if not at Colen’s farm. But in the future, he intends to again break convention by reenacting his landscapes’ cinematic inspirations. “I’ve been writing more ambitious, larger performances, [incorporating] costumes and makeup,” he says. “I think both are really important parts of my work now; the performance and the painting are necessary to make any progress with the other.”

Below, see a selection of Colen’s “HELP” paintings, on view now at Gagosian Park & 75, New York.