The gallery is pleased to present a summer group show including works by: Jess Allen, Michael Lombardo, Brittany Miller, Ernesto Renda, Ben Tong and Avery Wheless.

In a wide range of techniques and languages, all the paintings on display works like fragments of narratives. Similarly to the frame of a movie, the whole story can be imagined starting from there. Sometimes the clue that suggest the untold narrative is an interior scenography, sometimes a cloth or a shadow.

This is the case of Jess Allen, UK based artist. Her whole narrative is in absentia. The presence of figures is just suggested by their own shadows projected on domestic objects, such as couches or sofas. These shadows do not express though a sense of lack, but on the contrary they suggest a sense of intimancy to whom everyone can relate to, with engagement and no voyerism. In her recent interview published on Revue Eclipse, the artist better explain this concept as follow:

“Recently I discovered the Japanese term ‘Ma’, which is a term used to describe a very important part of their cultural aesthetic. In the essay ‘When Less is more: Japanese Concept of MA, Minimalism and Beyond’ ,Yukiko Kisaki describes Ma as ‘an emptiness full of possibilities, like a promise yet to be fulfilled’, and ‘the silence between the notes which make the music.’ Equally important in their architecture, space/ Ma, is significant as a place to pause. This concept is much more than a physical phenomena, but a philosophy of being, and a metaphor for existence.”

Also in the work of Brittany Miller, american painter based in NYC, the viewer has access to the intimancy of the subjects laying on sofas or beds. These are safe places, refuges from the world where no defences or masks are needed. In the painting “Any fool can get into an Ocean” for example, the artist is using a recurrent motiv referencing to medieval illuminated manuscripts that are telling the story of the End of the World in Revelations. The empty boat floating at night references a safe space, a savior, within the precarious and unknown ocean. The boat is the same idea as the way that she’s using the bed as a symbol of a womb/comforting and protective space. Building her paintings through a repetitive gestures of lines, those images appear like dreams themselves. The use of courtains in the background also suggest the idea of a stage in a theater, where a monologue or a piece is about to happen.

Michael Lombardo’s untold stories start instead from objects and clothes that he finds and collects. Being a LA based artist and studio assistant of Ed Ruscha, Michael has a strong photographic approach in his paintings – building up his compositions from real objects and representing them like instant polaroids. “Shirt with Citrus” takes inspiration indeed from a shirt belonged to the artist’s grandfather, that he photographed together with a Citrus – immediately bringing us to a family atmosphere. “Satin shirt with Rose Rock” takes inspiration instead from a found country shirt paired with a Rose Rock collected in the desert of Oklahoma where he grew up. The artist offers us all the clues we need to build up a new story. Interestingly, Lombardo spends time working up his surfaces, adding in unconventional materials like collected wood scraps from building his strainers from red oak that ina way charge the finished paintings with a sense of time and place. Lombardo adds these materials to almost act as an obstacle to finish a picture. Distorting the imagery to add a sense of dissonance and distance, like the way a memory can become unclear over time.