DOUGLAS FLORIAN, Spells and Apparitions, March 1-April 7
John Yau, Hyperallergic, When A Painting Becomes an Incantation
Bravin Lee programs is pleased to present Douglas Florian’s fifth solo exhibition with the gallery. In large-scale paintings, all oil on linen, language is merged with a vivid experience of line, shape, color, texture, and movement in ways and meanings that reveal themselves slowly.
The use of collage enables a jostling spatial ambiguity with forms overlapping or abutting, revealing or concealing each other. These works were spurred on or spirited into being by stray news stories, personal slights, obscure histories, abandoned songs, Japanese dreams, casual observations, or neglected poems. The paintings evoke personages or luminaries of renown, respect, or disrepute, and have a raw tactile, textural, and tangible quality that must be experienced directly, free from any device or apparatus.
Douglas Florian lives and works in New York City. His work has been exhibited at the Drawing Center of New York; Yeshiva University Museum, New York; the Neuberger Museum of Art, Purchase, NY; American University Museum, Katzen Art Center, Washington, DC; the Center for Maine Contemporary Art, Rockland, Maine; and Bowdoin College Museum of Art, Brunswick, Maine.