Excited to announce our next show “Between Light and Darkness” featuring works by
@neysagrassi and
@behind_the_reds . The shows opening reception will be Sunday, March 15th from 1-4pm. Come by and check out their works!
Show Writing:
Light. We fall easily and quickly under its spell, subject to the range of its sway, enveloping our emotions, feeding our senses. The paintings of Neysa Grassi and Stuart Shils are teeming with light in a variety of complexions, some are warm, bright and embracing, while others feel darker, more contemplative and melancholic.
Grassi’s Fever or Heat holds a world of luminous emotion. There we see warm oranges and deep reds built up, a surface constructed with many layers of paint, suggesting an almost topographical quality, as if looking down on a forest fire or a lava flow from above. Radiant color shines with the qualities of the title, conveying a heated-up intensity. Yet around the edges a colder blue moves in to contain that fire, reminding us that both our emotions and her paintings have their edges. Center and periphery each have a voice in Grassi’s work.
Shils’s How I Came to Know the Sun conjures light as a simmering chromatic chord. Here, the surface is animated not only with a wave of yellow giving way to darker greens, reds and evidence of the bare wood beneath but also, everywhere carving and digging at times delicate, but also more forceful. The narrative of color and cuts suggests the feeling of sun throwing streams of indentations stretching outward across the piece - rays finding their way through the invented world of an irregular but lyrical surface.
In the work of both Grassi and Shils the surface is alive with a sense of longing, reaching toward the viewer with quiet and often not so quiet melodies of light.
