ReVision

 curated by D. Dominick Lombardi

Galerie Protege is pleased to present ReVision, curated by D. Dominick Lombardi, featuring works by Paul Gagner, Stacy Greene, Eric Ramos Guerrero, Bill Gusky and Jeanne Tremel.

The information we absorb from a multitude of visual, cultural and virtual cues is constantly being shuffled and reorganized in our thoughts. “Living in the moment” has become a lost art as everything one experiences, even the most benign or inane occurrences, has to be recorded and passed along via social media. In stark contrast, Paul Gagner, Stacy Greene, Eric Ramos Guerrero, Bill Gusky and Jeanne Tremel express thoughtfully their personal histories via stimulating colors, curious subjects and compelling gestures in paint and mixed materials as they look at life through both their inward and outward worlds. As they attempt to make sense of it all the five artists selected for this exhibition reveal several fundamentally distinctive and uniquely visceral narratives that are oddly real, wholly arresting and deeply personal.

Paul Gagner, not unlike Philip Guston before him, finds a sort of deadpan, somewhat amusing take on the fallibility and eccentricities of the human condition. Reality is always in question and purpose is a sneaking suspicion in the loaded, and abnormally ‘everyday life’ paintings of Gagner. 

Stacy Greene has chosen a much different path mimicking in life and expressing in art the ongoing series Searching for Pierre Loti. In it, we see specific symbols accenting curious vagaries keeping us off-balance and wondering while the patterns and juxtapositions make for fantastical flights of fancy.

The art of Eric Ramos Guerrero embodies a new age of Social Realism. His art reveals how more and more, we see the world in overlapping, and at times disjointed experiences that mix the actual with the virtual. As a result, the here and now is mixed with parallel realities colored by pure emotion.

Bill Gusky presents us with many possible pathways with little or no way out. We get caught up in his unreasonable reasoning and find ourselves unanchored by the improbable yet enchanted by the unknowable to a point where, if we look hard enough, we may find the most basic truths. 

Jeanne Tremel is an uninhibited elaborator. Fact and fantasy come close to meeting but they never quite coalesce. What we do know from her work is that nature can be rivaled if the spirit is free from inhibition and the hands, heart and mind are willing to challenge and create.  

- D. Dominick Lombardi, curator