The Clear and the Obscure

The Clear and the Obscure is a group exhibition that brings together the work of four painters whose very different ways of working nevertheless possess salient affinities. From a preference for a bright, at times pastel and high-contrast palette, whose common debt to early European and American modernism is notable, to a proclivity for subject matter which sits comfortably on the threshold between figuration and abstraction, these four artists create works whose contours and intentions are at once clear and obscure. Methods and techniques among the group vary. For instance, where Michael Berryhill and Victoria Roth wield a much more intuitive, labored and vigorous approach toward generating their rich and evocative imagery, discovering it as they proceed, Patricia Treib’s quasi-calligraphic picture making is much more methodical, referring to a specific, repeated source, while Ryan Nord Kitchen essentially depicts landscapes which all but blaze into ideographic abstractions. But, in accordance with a common faith in painting as painting, these heterogeneous and highly sophisticated practices are deeply engaged in the cultivation of their own pictorial vocabularies, which are hard won and fueled by a commitment to color, facture and mark making. They create work in which intention is not the opposite but the very preserve of mystery, collectively gesturing toward the happy and ongoing co-existence of the two in contemporary painting.