Gabrielle Garland

Gabrielle Garland’s exhibition of paintings of houses at Corbette vs. Dempsy’s beautiful new space south of west town is, frankly, thrilling. A row of roughly 20”x30” oil paintings on canvas surrounds the back gallery, across its three walls offering a cascade of almost overwhelming revelation. 

There is something intensely alluring about the nature of their distortion that is immediately striking at the first glimpse of these works caught while turning the far corner of the Alan Shields’ show in the front. Before you can ever rationalize why, they present immediately as something totally irresistible. 

That fascination has something to do with a difficult-to-figure-out photographic quality about them, which just never explains itself at all. It is a very strong control of color maybe, especially value.  Their messy, painterly surfaces evoke a distinct presence of light and air. A presence of light and air so satisfying, in fact, it even seems to place each house in a quite specific geographic location. The elusive difference between the feel of the light, and the air in different regions of America.  They radiate a bright midday sun, in southern California, in Florida, or in the Midwest, distinctly. 

The deeper one looks, the more jarring the coexistence of that intense sense of reality with the absurdly unreal proves to be. It is compounded in every detail as the gallery becomes a transcendent space of sublime confusion. The application of paint is wild, even primitive. Every line is out of place, every shape is strange, and every texture is made up of almost goofy little decorative marks. Everything you thought you needed for a painting to tell you the truth, just isn’t there, but these paintings are just as true as they can be. I look at them and know - this place is real, and I’ve been there.