Dwellers

Please join us for the opening reception of Dwellers, a solo exhibition of paintings and animation by Lorella Paleni. The show will be on view from October 18 - November 18. Please read below to learn more about it. Hope to see you there!

PRESS RELEASE:
E.TAY Gallery is pleased to present Dwellers, a solo exhibition of paintings by Lorella Paleni. Paleni’s work investigates the relationships between humans and animals. Her paintings are tangled scenes of encounters in the wild that invite viewers to grapple with their own ecological consciousness.  

Through a process of overlapping, erasing, adding and scraping, dynamic landscapes emerge on Paleni’s canvases. Colors and compositions are arranged in a conflicting manner that evokes both mysticism and sinister intent. While the natural environment dominates the pictorial landscape, ambiguous human characters invade the settings to disrupt the harmony.

In Dwellers, gloved human hands, ghostly industrious figures, monkeys, branches, and other beings inhabit the paintings. The foreground and background intersect with the creatures in an inextricable mesh illustrating that, despite the estrangement between human and nonhuman worlds, they are invariably part of an intricate whole. 

Paleni’s paintings are an attempt to question the power structure that lies at the root of our reasoning to question human exceptionalism and imagine new possibilities of existence in the world. The work seems to acknowledge that society is hierarchical, and that the few who rise to the top often do so at the expense of the voiceless.