Press

"First, it’s the capture of light that draws your attention, refracted across the canvas like rippled water in a creek. Then it’s the way colour and movement wrestle in undulating lines, dragging and splitting pigment into huge writhing forms. Physical and full of life, Fran O’Neill’s paintings captivate from the minute you walk in the gallery door."

‘I have always been fascinated by colour. I need it around me and on me’.

Patricia Iglesias. Artist. New York City.

‘There were several things that motivated this last body of work, but two of them were the death of a close friend and the other was the birth of a baby. Flowers were something that both these events shared.

In these important rituals of life like weddings, funerals and celebrations, flowers are ever present, announcing beginnings and endings, so they became a good starting point for my work.  Flowers have been used in decoration from textiles to wallpapers and silverware and are often associated with the idea of making things more beautiful. In my opinion, flowers are also used as a way of concealing, hiding the ugliness and the pain and the rotten.

"Digesting Shelley Reed’s paintings felt a lot like discovering that tick on the back of your leg hours after a jaunt through the woods. With the utmost conviction, the tick quietly clung to its chosen host, fastened itself within the layers of fleshy epidermis, and fed until its swollen body pulsed with excess. Fortunately, Reed’s paintings do not carry Lyme disease or Rocky Mountain spotted fever. However, they infect the viewer with something much more revealing of its source and equally uncomfortable to contract. Contextualized by the looming crescendo of the information age, Reed’s exhibited work at the Fitchburg Art Museum begged the question: are curiosity and paranoia two sides of the same coin?"

"I’ve spent the last two years documenting the Mid-century Modern motels of the Wildwoods, a group of shore towns on a five-mile island in southern New Jersey. Built in the ’50s and ’60s and virtually unchanged, they form the largest concentration of postwar resort architecture in the US. As a native of the Jersey Shore, I’ve always been interested in the coast’s history and buildings, and when I happened upon the Wildwoods one winter, I felt like I’d travelled back in time."

"The shape of Celia Gerard’s studio is akin to an isosceles triangle whose apex has been leveled. It is a slightly irregular shape, but with a door on one end, a window at the other and a set of walls connecting base to foregone-tip, its geometric irregularity recedes beneath the structural logic of a building within which this little polygon fits neatly. When I imagine an image generated by changes in the layout of this building—small studios merging; larger ones being subdivided—I see fluctuating spatial relationships defined within a set of unchanging parameters. Older forms become ghosted beneath newly constructed arrangements that arise as they are needed. There is a natural order that underlies this apparent chaos; the question is how does one find that natural order? How does a person cultivate the ability to see the logical operations that give shade and shape to what may otherwise appear tangled and arbitrary?"

"Two gallery shows of contemporary art in Manhattan bring geometry and tactility together with vibrant results. New York–based artist Celia Gerard is exhibiting her signature large-scale mixed media drawings alongside relief sculptures in ceramic and bronze at Sears Peyton Gallery in Chelsea. At Fox Gallery on the Upper West Side, Greek artist Eozen Agopian adds thread and fabric to her abstract paintings. Large and small-scale works by Ms. Agopian fill two rooms of the salon-style gallery. Both artists use the pictorial language of geometric abstraction to take on the mantle of Cubism.

In Ms. Gerard’s drawings, triangles appear and disappear in transparent veils of muted hues that press toward and away from the picture plane. Black lines zigzag playfully across the page, creating scalene triangles in “Ghost Bird,” 2016. Translucent layers of aqueous blues cover large areas of the composition, delineating white and pale-yellow birdlike forms. Ms. Gerard achieves formal tension here by combining soft, barely-there atmospheric color with resolute, geometric clarity. Her abstracted birds in flight recall Georges Braque’s iconic “oiseaux,” a recurring symbol in the Cubist master’s late work."

Charcoal is the medium of choice for Rick Shaefer, whose powerful drawings reflect his fascination with, and mastery of, the "integrity of the line."

Bent over a waist-high, eight-foot-square table in his airy, light-filled studio, Fairfield-based artist Rick Shaefer seems lost in thought as he feverishly draws with charcoal on a massive sheet of white vellum. He works quickly but precisely, scratching out crisp black lines.

Pausing and standing back to inspect his progress, he explains why he prefers to create works in charcoal rather than paint, pencil, or some other medium. "It's so primitive," he says. "Our Paleolithic ancestors were scratching with burnt wood on the walls of caves, and I like to think - at the risk of sounding too romantic - that using charcoal somehow links me to what artists have been doing for thousands of years. I also like the tonality, the rich, crisp blacks on white that I get with charcoal."

"Jen Wink Hays paints with the canvas flat on her studio table, peering down into its emergent world like a bird in the sky. Playful and beguiling, her paintings and works on paper induce a sense of wonder, curiosity and even elation. It is a feeling akin to looking out of the airplane window flying high above the clouds, perhaps en route to a favourite place. The eye searching, the mind wandering and the heart dreaming, hence the title to her first show opening in Miami at Art Bastion on the 22nd of April: Vacationland."

"It’s hard to imagine a series of minimalist, monochrome geometric reliefs as “soft”, and yet in Agnes Barley’s hands, they are.

"Her latest show, “Agnes Barley: Shadow Structures” at Sears Peyton Gallery in New York’s Chelsea, is dedicated mostly to an untitled series of medium- and large-scale relief panels and sculptures, all involving stacked geometric arrangements in meditative white. Her series (Untitled Collage) Late Grid Waves is also on display, but the main focus lies on those mesmerizing, graphic reliefs that play with space, light, and line through variations in height and the occasional shadow thrown here and there."

"Manhattan’s Sears-Peyton Gallery exhibits several artists who could be said to focus on the mane event, including Jane Rosen and Thomas Hager. The California-based Rosen paints and sculpts horses and other wildlife on her ranch, working with equal virtuosity across a variety of media, from hard Provençal limestone to soft charcoal on paper. Hager, for his part, does cyanotypes and pigment prints of horses, giving an elegiac and timeless quality to his subjects.

"Another Sears Peyton artist, Brooklyn- and Vermont-based Suzy Spence puts her own modern-day spin on English sporting art. “I love these paintings, with all their tension and complexity, and I return to them again and again,” says Spence, who makes loosely painted, charmingly gestural scenes. “They’ve come to represent refinement, but what many people don’t know is that this manly sporting life was actually quite debauched.” Spence cites both the Lascaux cave paintings and painter Susan Rothenberg’s well-known contemporary series of abstracted horses as secondary inspirations."