On view January 6 - January 29, 2012
Opening reception First Friday January 6, 6pm - 9pm

In Nationale’s Highlighter, co-curators Amy Bernstein and May Juliette Barruel round up six exhilarating young painters for an intimate, studio-style exhibition. Showing only recent works from the artists, Bernstein and Barruel openly engage with the now in order to emphasize the heuristic energy guiding such innovation in the first place.

Through a shared language of brilliant colors and jostling patterns, inspired in part by the excess of modern culture, the canvases of Bernstein, James Boulton, John Brodie, Timothy Scott Dalbow, Marie Koetje and K Scott Rawls function as a playground for symbolic and formal invention. However, despite such non-representational tendencies, the works ultimately renounce the highbrow tenets of traditional abstraction in favor of more relatable, personal experiences. Like an aesthetic transubstantiation, the act of painting converts momentarily from a studied medium to a mean for catharsis as the artists attempt to decipher society’s fraught existence through each arresting stroke. Whatever the end result, it is always this encounter that matters most for, as Mr. Dalbow avows, “each painting is an excuse to ask the question again.”

Image: California (detail), oil on canvas (in Timothy Scott Dalbow’s studio)
James Boulton appears courtesy of Pulliam Gallery (http://pulliamgallery.com/)