143 Reade is a private gallery in a residential building in Tribeca.
Tom McGrath, Santi Moix, Jackie Saccoccio
January 28 – April 28, 2014
By Appointment
Lucien Terras is pleased to present an exhibition of works by New York based painters Tom McGrath, Santi Moix and Jackie Saccoccio. Borrowing from the traditions of observation, each of the artists challenges the historical purview of conventional subject matters. Using landscape, still life and portraiture as a departure point for their work, the imagery maintains itself as both classical and contemporary as the paintings approach abstraction.
Tom McGrath’s attempt to capture a contemporary landscape leaves his canvases completely devoid of any single vantage point. Granting viewers with only a few moments of perceptible images, the work begins to reveal itself not so much as a landscape but rather the artist’s investigation of movement through a landscape. In these new works, which are being exhibited for the first time, McGrath’s paintings strike us with a strange and unnatural setting as the viewer searches for a sense of place and perspective that is continuously being obscured. The pattern of a chain link fence forbids access to the escape in the depth of representation and reminds us that landscape is a constructed cultural entity.
Santi Moix’s paintings, which are also being shown for the first time, are a buoyant explosion of color, form and line. Seeming as though they could approach either genre of still life or landscape, Moix’s work hovers between both. In two large paintings, strings of geometric forms and circular doodles on white backgrounds erupt from a single moment to reveal a studied focus. In a third work, the tentacular composition returns as the main subject while expansive blue skies construct a curious atmosphere. But the artist makes for a quick retreat from either subject matter by adorning his canvases with lively biomorphic shapes or the whimsical presence of a mosquito.
Jackie Saccoccio presents two paintings from her 2012 “Portraits” series. Stained with splashes of color and layered with painterly gestures, different visual readings begin to emerge from her canvases. The space of the picture seems to be in constant motion, swaying slightly as if it were opening itself up to viewers. Saccoccio’s expressionistic works push beyond the accepted vernacular of abstraction. As the titles of these paintings suggests, abstraction merely becomes a vehicle for portraiture in Saccoccio’s work.
