Catalyst Contemporary presents, "Channeling Landscape," a solo exhibition featuring the works of painter Arthur Jedson Smalley. These new paintings are mesmerizing, whirling reflections on water and spiraling, abstract landscapes of thickets & brambles tracing new visual directions for his work.
Featured in both the Main Gallery and The Back Room, the paintings range in locations both real and imagined. Some pieces are vibrant and pulsing with colors and others are calmer and still, reflecting the water they depict. A majority of the works can be viewed in a multitude of ways as the landscapes shift and rearrange depending on your distance from them; up close, the poured and dribbled paint become alternative forms and from far away they commingle to create the final anatomy of the landscape.
The impulse to start Smalley’s process comes from a fascination with the notion of Golden Proportions and geometric curves found throughout nature. The process of working, in an attempt to fall into rhythm with these rules that dictate all carbon-based form is cathartic for Smalley. There are two distinct ways Smalley handles the paint; the first is thin moving lines of colors that are distinct from each other as seen in "Multiflora." The second style of painting has thicker blocks of color that have less of a contrast and more of a realistic rendering as seen in "Lake Pearl." Here the color blocks start to lose their definite edges and merges more into the realm of a photographic rendition with the demonstration of shifting color values with the change in perspective.
"Channeling Landscape" invites you to see Smalley’s collection of works that reflects upon the materiality of the medium, landscapes tied to reality and at the same time, to his subconscious. Within the coalescing rhythm of the paint, a ritualistic performance is recorded by the resulting marks.
