Foley Gallery is pleased to present CUT, an exhibition featuring new work by Bradley Castellanos, Keith Maddy, and Billy Renkl. CUT continues to explore and deepen the gallery's interest in cut, painted, and manipulated paper.
Bradley Castellanos' work captures the feeling of coming upon the mysterious and unexplainable. Paintings and works on paper depart from the real world by transcending memories of experience into fantastical colors and gestures. Surreal landscapes and supernatural, magical beings are conduits of art and creation, metaphors of the creative process. They are artists, healers, and mediums attempting to harness, explore, process, digest, and transcend a wild and unpredictable world.
As a child, Keith Maddy's love of coloring books offered an inner sanctuary of unfettered imagination where play, adventure, and the joy of coloring and mark-making were intertwined. As an artist, they provide endless source material for his collages. The collages source vintage Asian prints and folding screens as background environments, creating a playground of imaginary and dream-like landscapes where characters of all sorts, liberated from vintage childhood pages, now festively parade and co-mingle in a celebration of life. Dichotomies of East and West, old and new, high and low, merge seamlessly with animals, humans, and environments that are at once out of scale yet perfectly associated. These open-ended narratives embrace a child's mind's exuberance and magical world that can transform and cross barriers, have imaginary friends, and be anything or anyone: an astronaut, a cowboy, a ballerina, or a talking animal.
Billy Renkl's series, Cover, continues his love affair with found paper and how it begins to tell a story of its history that can interplay with contemporary thought. Specifically, the series title refers to the analog spread of ideas via the postal service, beautifully suited to that task, and to the way that a letter covers ground; there is also a reference to the fact that stamp collectors identify an envelope as a "cover." Vintage European correspondence envelopes create a fertile ground for cut silhouettes of monochromatic flora, potted and placed, giving this "cover" a new destination.
CUT is on view through February 12th, 2023. Foley Gallery is open Wednesday through Sunday, 12 – 5:30 PM. To request images, please get in touch with the gallery at hello@foleygallery.com.