Edward Thorp Gallery to Open Group Exhibit JUNCTION, 9/12

Edward Thorp Gallery has announced Junction, a group exhibition of recent painting from six contemporary artists. All the works exhibit a vocabulary of highly expressive and personal imagery. These artists raise enduring questions about painting and the framing of visual issues around its language such as process, form and authorship. The exhibition will be on view September 12 through October 25, 2014.

Kurt Lightner's paintings of builders and buildings conjure scenes that exist somewhere between reality and fantasy. Emphasizing the balance between mark making, created by stained, almost etched surfaces, and illusion, an atmospheric study of men and women at work is achieved. These seamlessly produced narrative works double as apparitions of a romanticized view of time and place.

With works that reference his youth in an East Coast urban setting Jason Stopa's language incorporates sports, music and fast food imagery. These instinctive and obsessive works hover between representation and abstraction flirting with the decorative and nostalgic. Bright and graphic surfaces are produced through an experimentation of different mediums, including oil, acrylic, spray paint, glitter and enamel, which are either stained or thickly impastoed. Stopa's loosely constructed paintings document both a wide-ranging and personal cultural history.

Rob Nadeau's abstractions operate in the gap between the carefully constructed surface and the chance encounter. This incident and intention scenario is achieved with an array of hyper-subtle paint strokes often laced with flecks of graphite, stones sourced from the Narraganset Bay's shore, or with metallic paint. The atmospheric and gestural combinations produce glistening and engaging surfaces, bringing to mind both nature, such as the shimmer of light, and the calligraphic signage of commercial art

In his densely layered oil paintings Russell Tyler employs a deceivingly simple color language often constructed with monochrome bands and gradated geometry. In creating a shallow depth, he produces a picture plane that alludes to blank TV and computer screens. This imagery is a confluence of mid century modernist avant-garde color theories, and of the primitive digital landscapes of outdated 8-bit graphics seen in bygone era computer programs and video games.

Sarah Faux's intuitive painterly imagery depicts the experience of the human form both in its actual physical appearance and also beyond, in the psychological realm of the disembodied. With a loose painterly process that gropes towards figuration, elements emerge, yet while recognizable, the content remains undefined. Combining equal degrees of informality, nuance and improvisation, her work results in figuration that is dissociated from the mere physical world, describing a more sensory experience of physicality.

A self-taught Canadian artist, Mark DeLong works with a vibrant palette of expressive graphic shapes, and muscular paint handling. Exploring the difficult relationship between abstraction and representation, he imaginatively handles his appreciation of Modernist-inspired motifs, reinterpreting the human figure, landscape, and still life. The complexity and layering of the paintings invite us to look for a narrative in works that would normally be regarded as pure surface abstraction. Incorporating a sense of humor in approach, his paintings become both monumental and playful and always unconventional.

Gallery hours 11am to 6pm, Tuesday through Saturday. Email: edwardthorpgallery@gmail.com.