In her second solo show at 303 Gallery, Maureen Gallace’s paintings and drawings represent a specific sense of place. Small in scale, the rural and suburban scenes are seemingly quiet, even subdued, as they observe the horizontal orientation, picturesque settings and scarcity of movement of traditional landscape. Gallace’s landscapes, drawn from her hometown and vacation sites, allude to the unspoken as they hover restlessly between abstraction and representation.
Whether it’s the paleness of skies or the facelessness of a building, each element of the paintings dissolves into a purely formal excercise. Trees are irregular blocks of color on which spare paint quotations have been laid down, while houses are blocky rectangles of opaque pigment. As abstractions, the paintings reveal their method of construction: each mark visible and clear, the weave of the canvas smoothly emerging, so that everything that went into the making of a painting is laid bare. The tension between abstraction and representation conveys a distinctly modern sense of disquiet while using the pictorial strategies of the supposedly stable and sure genre of landscape.