Full List of Writing
Max Jansons + Joani Tremblay
"Viewed together, the landscapes and still lifes of Jansons and Tremblay create a context in which beauty and uncertainty remain closely bound. In both practices, nature is treated less as scenery than as a means of giving visible shape to inner experience, generating a sense of reverence shadowed by loss. Rather than resolving these tensions, their paintings allow shifting emotional states to remain suspended, inviting viewers to reflect on such conflicting feelings."
Patrick Groth: The Most Important of the Least Important Things
"Here, the matches are suspended at the threshold between movement and pause, turning individual athletes into compositional elements within a total arrangement: bodies with wavering limbs and patterned jerseys are set against field markings that divide the picture plane."
JJ Manford + James Rosenquist
"Yet both artists share a proclivity toward heightened chroma and a surrealist edge. Manford’s compositions take greater liberties with spatial coherence, assembling convergent rooms that resist resolution into a singular environment . . . Similarly, Rosenquist’s doll faces are at once direct and estranged, their enlarged features drawing in the viewer while remaining distanced by their synthetic surfaces."
Noel W Anderson: Courtside Sermon
"The figures he portrays, alongside the techniques that give them shape, appear simultaneously exalted and unsettled, ultimately asking whether Black culture can be understood as a stable category as it is broadcast through the entertainment industry."
Sophia Huitema: Prussian Blue
"Huitema’s paintings draw on a range of art-historical and visual references while maintaining a distinct internal coherence. The attenuated proportions and stylized poses of her figures recall traditions of early twentieth-century fashion illustration and Art Deco design, where gesture and embellishment echo the streamlined finesse of illustrators such as Erté and the theatrical poise found in interwar couture and stage design."
Eleanor Johnson + Lydia Makin: Entanglements
"A defining presence across her [Johnson's] work is a sense of excess, expressed through tumbling, fleshy bodies and mythic, bacchanalian scenes of ecstatic play or violence, with many compositions occupying an uneasy juncture between the two. Taking inspiration from Peter Paul Rubens’s muscular and voluptuous nudes, her figures are faceless and androgynous, stripped of individuating characteristics. These corporeal forms melt together and disintegrate into turbulent brushstrokes that swirl across the canvas in an unstable pictorial world."
Iria Leino: In Two Parts—The Colorfield Series
"Her two-dimensional surfaces remain wafer-thin, allowing the purity of her colors to span and mingle across the compositions without interruption. Such an approach—novel at the time, since acrylic pigments could be thinned in ways that linseed oil could not—channels techniques adopted by contemporaries such as Helen Frankenthaler, Morris Louis, Kenneth Noland, and Jules Olitski."
Iria Leino: In Two Parts—The Suomen Suo and Colorfield Series
"Continuing her commitment to painting without a brush, Leino harnessed gravity to shape her compositions. For one year, the artist focused her forceful splashing and pouring techniques at the center of the canvas, concentrating visual energy inward rather than dispersing it toward the edges of the picture plane."
Iria Leino: 1968–1970
"Although Leino was exceptionally ambitious, foregrounding a rigorous painterly practice comparable to her contemporaries, the artist repeatedly rejected the idea of transforming her creations into a professional endeavor. She ultimately believed that her creative pursuits served a higher metaphysical purpose, one that could not be fulfilled by the materialistic gains of fame and commercial recognition."
Jeremy Lawson: Tandem Jump
"What you’re saying reminds me of Michelangelo’s famous quote, “The sculpture is already complete within the marble block, before I start my work. It is already there, I just have to chisel away the superfluous material.” It seems to me that you’re saying the material has agency and wants you to discover its full potential through the process of making. In other words, your mode of creating is a reversal of cause and effect: the object is the artist and you, the creator, are the medium."
Young-Il Ahn: Memories of Water
"Every stroke was masterfully applied by a palette knife in alternating directions and various intensities, loosely ordered by an invisible grid. Ahn’s embrace of subtle tonal shifts produces wavering patterns, which allows his compositions to mimic the fluidity of placid seas. The interplay of warm and cool tones further evokes the shimmering glow of light refracting off ripples, swells, and crests along the water’s surface."
Allie McGhee: Parallax
"He imaginatively pairs motifs like African tribal masks, the Ubangi figure, free jazz, and his own personal symbol, the Banana Moon Horn, with evocative depictions of the everlasting: marks resembling prehistoric cave paintings and imagery that recalls the vast celestial sky. In this unique combination of idioms, McGhee embraces modernist techniques pioneered by the Cubists and Abstract Expressionists, which bring out the fullest potential of paint as material—its viscous, tactile, and malleable qualities."
Jeremy Lawson: Compound
"Treating each piece as if it has commanding powers over his decision-making, Lawson wrestles with recalcitrant materials in order to discover the painting’s aesthetic resolution. Often failing in the early stages—and at times failing altogether—he dutifully starts anew if he suspects that his own hand has become overly dominant. Whenever these moments occur, he must 'break the piece and rework it for the painting to come into its own,' as Lawson himself puts it."
Carlos Jacanamijoy: Gratitud
"Jacanamijoy pivoted towards non-representational abstraction and color field painting for its universalizing appeal and radical openness. Often working on supports that far exceed human scale, his canvases are immersive experiences that beckon the audience to enter into his illusionistic tableaux. Vibrant red, amber, and viridescent hues swirl atop navy or powder blue washes that appear to glow from within. The amorphic shapes look as if they are spontaneously weaving in and out of each other, creating a surface that pulses like a living organism or bursts open like a galactic dreamscape."
JJ Manford: Our House
"Primarily painting on large linen and burlap supports—many at or near bodily scale—Manford accurately portrays linear perspective to play into the illusory sense that his pictures could be physically entered. Yet, his imagery continues to retain a dreamlike quality through highly saturated palettes, exaggerating the intensity of color relationships experienced in the empirical world."
Lizbeth Mitty: Postcard Perfect
"Straddling the line between control and chance, Mitty’s nimble technique embraces the fluid characteristics of her acrylic medium. Allowing her marks to pool, drip, and swirl across the surfaces of her compositions, the melding forms portray scenes of nature in a constant state of flux. Still lifes of food arrangements with potted plants appear to be melting away like candle wax, and vast mountainscapes and seaside villages wisp into each other in the distance."
Willie Wayne Smith: Seasonal Dancing Dolls
"Amusingly calling his technique “state fair sfumato,” Willie Wayne Smith embraces the intersection of high and low culture. His acrylic and airbrush compositions feature overlapping pictures and text from a variety of sources, portraying allegorical situations through an ensemble of art historical styles. Random graffiti scribbles, expressionistic splatters, and imaginary cartoon characters encircle dramatic tableaux of everyday people candidly posing in fantastical settings."
Susumu Kamijo: How Was Your Summer?
"Conceptualizing his pictures as living things, Kamijo believes that the poodles in this latest series have transmogrified into something else entirely: their somas have become empty vessels that host unknown sentient organisms, morphing from domesticated pets to wild beasts. How Was Your Summer? subverts the lighthearted portrayal of poodles as precious show dogs, bringing unsettling aspects of this motif to the surface."
Frederic Tuten: Works on Cardboard
"Teacups, vases, jugs, and potted plants rest on tabletops, while sombreros, clocks, boats, and disembodied faces freely drift across the picture plane. Mountains ascend out of the horizon and peppered throughout the vistas are miniature houses and towering candle-shaped structures, altering any sense of scale or perspective."
JJ Manford: View from Gowanus
"With a subtle sense of humor, Manford’s work celebrates the fact that anyone has an opportunity to become an aesthete by acquiring products of high culture as well as their consumer-grade reproductions. The orderly ambiance of these uninhabited living spaces suggests that the quarters are meant to be displayed rather than occupied, as if world culture can be contemplatively experienced within the enclosures of Manford’s cultivated interiors."
Scott Kahn: Afternoon of a Faun
"Kahn seamlessly blends interior and exterior worlds to create intricately detailed dreamscapes, giving shape to the elusive character of the subconscious through natural forms. In contrast to the enigmatic vignettes conjured by emotions, memories, and fleeting impressions, all elements in his scenes are executed with fastidious precision; each blade of grass, star in the sky, and ripple in the sea is tidily rendered, suggesting a sensuous lucidity to these otherworldly realms."
Michelangelo Lovelace: Brick City
"By painting freehand, Lovelace’s unfiltered technique produces distorted scenes that take on a dreamlike quality. Accuracy in linear perspective and depth of field are abandoned in favor of exaggerated renderings and skewed, hallucinatory angles. Body proportions wildly vary despite their location on the picture plane . . . and vehicles often appear elongated and compressed . . . These idiosyncratic features highlight the artist’s skill at visualizing a childlike sense of wonderment when encountering the ceaseless animation of city blocks."
Matthew King: Recurring Paintings
"The edge of each swath has the characteristic waviness of a steady hand: generally straight and clean but with minor fluctuations along its course. Embracing this imprecision, he accentuates the optical vibration already created by his interplay of form and chroma, figure and ground. A pulse runs throughout the canvas, giving his approach an organic quality typically lacking in austere hard-edged abstraction."
Spencer Lewis
"Composed of layered streaks of smeared, dripped, and spackled paint, Lewis’s canvases dwell in the tension between opposites: chaos and restraint, implosion and explosion, language and image, process and product. In his impasto paintings, variegated lines coalesce, darting diagonally, horizontally, and vertically like violent slashes against their jute backdrops. These brushstrokes are at once energetically rendered—defined by the sweeping gestures and movements of the body—and carefully determined, with brisk swathes of white and saturated pigment evoking a shifting plane of unfolding space."
Nicasio Fernandez: Working Through It
"When we were planning this show, Nicasio told me he wanted to address the theme of laboring away, to depict situations of people’s ritualized existence on the clock. The end result, however, amounts to more than simply recording the worker’s daily grind. He collides the world of surrealist fantasy and banal circumstance to add color to what is typically a grey experience."
Spencer Lewis: Violet Paintings for the Red and Blue Studio
"Using a combination of raw pigment, oil, acrylic, enamel, and spray paint, Lewis makes aggressive impasto paintings on large cardboard substrates, elevating the utilitarian material through his artistic interventions."
Matthew King: The Vanishing American
"The muscular legacy of American culture from the 1960s and 70s has been a recurring subject for King. His airtight amalgamations deliberately reactivate predominant idioms of Minimalism, Op Art, and Appropriation Photography."
Matthew King: This Side Down
"His works employ techniques specific to hard-edge painting and photo collage, taking the form of three-dimensional objects that defy easy categorization. They function both as pictures and sculptures, always insisting on their spatial presence."