Surface
Jeffrey Palladini, Klari Reis, and Piero Spadaro
August 5 – September 3, 2015

​Surface: of, on, or pertaining to the surface; apparent rather than real
 
This exhibition aims to bring together a group of diverse artists, working in various mediums, who all push the boundaries of a typical art object’s surface. Jeffrey Palladini, Klari Reis, and Piero Spadaro each invite the viewer to question what is before them and further examine.

Jeffrey Palladini’s Monitor Paintings, as their title denotes, are painted television monitors with a digital video running on a fixed loop. The conceptual underpinning of these works is the duality between stillness and motion, the passive and the active, and the tensions created between the two. These works are intentionally constructed to behave like paintings, similar to his oil works on panel, though the foreground of a looped video creates an unexpected surface.
(More of his works may be found on his portfolio page.)

Klari Reis is exhibiting both painting and installation based pieces that are anything but traditional. In both bodies of works, Reis uses the tools and techniques of science, constantly experimenting with new ways to apply materials and methods. The unifying theme is her mastery of a new plastic, epoxy polymer, which is UV resistant. The surface of her paintings give the appearance of three-dimensional wall sculptures with compositions of brightly colored smears, bumps, shifts, stains, and blobs atop aluminum and wood panels. Her installation series entitled Hypochondria, consists of hand-painted petri dishes mounted on the wall at varying distances, densities, and stylistic groupings.

Piero Spadaro enlists assorted materials such as glitter, textured paper, ground pigment, acrylic, and resin to create paintings in the color field tradition with a revamped and provocative contemporary vibe. His work strikes a balance between deliberation and chance creating topographical maps that flow over the surface on panels. His surfaces are textured and dense with divisions, or bands, alluding to horizons that are layered, fleeting, and always relative.
(More of his works may be found on his portfolio page.)