Silas Von Morisse gallery is pleased to announce, Stephen Maine Eight Paintings, the artist first solo exhibition at the gallery. On view at 109 Ingraham Street, April 5- 29, 2018, opening Thursday April 5th, 2018.

In this new series of 20-by-16-inch acrylic-on-canvas works, the artist used a single screen-printing stencil to further his ongoing investigation of color, surface, process and seriality. Recognized for his deliberate yet improvisational technique and sumptuous, idiosyncratic palette, Maine achieves a beguiling synthesis of chance and purposefulness with these paintings, in which the same all-over composition finds several different ways to sizzle.

Stephen Maine, has been quietly working out a language of process-driven abstraction for a number of years, experimenting with various methods of applying acrylic paint that defy easy identification – the pictures sometimes look like photos or photographically derived silkscreens, other passages resemble x-rays, some look like they were eroded by acid or exploit the resistance of oil and water. The resulting enigmatic images are the most prominent aspect of these all-over compositions, but the real glue is the color. Some are in tightly controlled, narrow value ranges – the light ones look backlit and the dark ones look spooky. Some are in colors that self-consciously clash in a loud-shirt, op sort of way. Each color grouping has its own emotional content, strongly influencing the kind of information that paint application supplies – pictures made with the same process might evoke a summer day or an MRI of a brain depending on the palette.

Stephen maine (American, b. 1958, lives and works in Brooklyn, NY). MFA (Visual Art), Vermont College of Fine Arts, Montpelier VT, 2014, BFA (Painting), Indiana University, Bloomington IN, 1982, Yale Summer School of Music and Art, Norfolk CT, 1981, School of Fine Arts, University of Connecticut, Storrs CT, 1977-1979, Hartford Art School, University of Hartford, West Hartford CT, 1977, Rhode Island School of Design, Providence RI, 1975.