Continuing through January 31, 2015
Vibrantly colored abstract paintings and softly focused landscapes are amicable cohabitants in a diverse seven-person show highlighting a few artists new to the gallery along with established ones.
Commanding perhaps the most attention are the paintings by Diane L. Silver, who has incorporated single words and indecipherable texts into her previous, more subdued work. Here, though, the handwriting — sometimes resembling columns of Japanese calligraphy — enjoys an interplay with large swatches of electric hues such as turquoise, coral and lilac. Sometimes the black script appears above the paint and sometimes it’s obscured by it. But each painting emits surprises of gestural brushstrokes and geometric shapes.
Ellen Wagener, for her part, is engaged in the intense study of landscapes, especially trees, and is known for taking pastel works to new heights with her large, intricately detailed renderings of majestic canopies, full of gnarls, bends and striations. Lending tranquility is Wagener’s set of four pastels, all titled “Mark Twain, Cry Me a Twilight River,” which are four views of the same tree-lined river on different days.
The show shifts from the pastoral to the urban with works by Mark Vinci, who salvages billboard advertisements and cuts the paper into thin strips for horizontal application onto panels, complemented by acrylic paint. Although the works create a remarkable sense of movement, with careful viewing it’s possible to glean commentaries on the mass media, body image and conspicuous consumption.
Adding further diversity are: Bernard Dunaux, with three, six-foot-tall canvases using acrylic and resin to create polished and layered color fields of white, magenta and gray; Michelle Benoit, with six-inch-square Lucite and maple boxes that pop with neon colors; Susan Howard, with photo-based works on paper that call biological and celestial images to mind; and Chris Richter, with minimalist panels suggestive of dissected trees.
