A group show of color essentialism opens Friday at Giampietro Gallery in New Haven

Giampietro Gallery—Works of Art
315 Peck St., New Haven, (203) 777-7760
Chromacosm
Feb. 3—Mar. 3, 2012.
Opening Reception: Fri., Feb. 3, 5—8 p.m.

Press Release

Giampietro Gallery is pleased to present Chromacosm, a group exhibition that brings together six artists who embrace color as a primary and essential element of their work. Artists presented are: Melissa Brown, Clint Jukkala, Zachary Keeting, Joshua Marsh, Douglas Melini, and Tamara Zahaykevich. The exhibit is on view from Feb. 3 to Mar. 3, 2012.

Conjuring worlds, both abstract and representational, the artists in Chromacosm think and speak in color as much as through drawing, imagery, or material. While associations abound, color here is felt more than named. Jewel-like hues, chromatic spills, and atmospheric gradations, evoke imagined spaces made of vibrant pigments. The works in Chromacosm are not so much about color, but rather color is the DNA that brings these images and objects to life.

Melissa Brown paints alien rock and landscape forms from another world. Composed largely of hard edges and graphic shapes, the stratified layers of these strange formations reveal the spectral glow of unnatural, interior hues.

Clint Jukkala’s paintings offer portals into sensory worlds of color, geometry, and remembered experience. Ostensibly abstract, they refer to the real world, suggesting interior spaces, windows, and landscape vistas.

Zachary Keeting (see image) brushes, pours, and scrapes gestures that accumulate and collapse into complex colorful layers. Paint slides, skids, bubbles and drips, creating translucent and opaque movements of intertwined forms.

Joshua Marsh’s paintings on burlap hum with the glow of limited and precise hues. Yet these still lives of seemingly everyday objects are transformed into eerie, infrared images where boundaries blur and color traces the remnants of contours.

Douglas Melini weaves brilliant, painted designs of finely tuned colored lines. Horizontals, verticals, and diagonals accumulate into trippy, kaleidoscope plaids enclosed by hand painted wooden frames.

Tamara Zahaykevich’s intimate, sculptural gems are made of paper, foam and paint. Idiosyncratic in form and built of decidedly raw materials, her jaunty constructions radiate energy and suggest narrative possibility.

Melissa Brown is a New York based artist, Clint Jukkala and Zachary Keeting are New Haven based artists represented by Giampietro Gallery. Joshua Marsh is based in Philadelphia and is represented by Jeff Bailey Gallery in New York. Douglas Melini is based in New York. Tamara Zahaykevich is based in New York and represented by Kansas Gallery.