State Park

Paul Petro Contemporary Art is pleased to present a new body of work by Gary Evans. This is his tenth solo exhibition with the gallery and the first to formally present his watercolours alongside his oil paintings.

"These latest paintings have divided themselves into two groups. They are united in the sense that they document places, and that I work on them concurrently, but that is obviously where it ends.

The paintings in the main gallery are products of a totally imaginative process. I have been creating paintings composed of organic shapes for several years and lately the prevailing need or focus seems to be in gathering these shapes together to effect some kind of compressed group that may be seen as a generator of energy or other effects in that objects and colours etcetera are coming and going.

These groups are arranged on a landscape plane. However, in considering them during their creation I can't help but feel they are still lifes disguised as landscapes. Purely sculptural ideas in two dimensions. Ultimately I feel they may function as masks in a way as they are a bit impenetrable.

Interspersed among these paintings are the 3x4 ft painting State Park, and the larger Expanded Interior. Both I hope set some of the shapes free to surround or encompass the viewer and are more direct in their connections to traditional landscapes.

The set of smaller paintings in the upstairs gallery are documents of spaces or abstractions found in the landscape. I have resisted the urge to abstract these beyond the point where they are no longer readable or wholly personal - just really things glimpsed in passing or fragments that are frozen points in a world full of countless objects or places. Hopefully in becoming singular they will feel familiar.

Also included in the show are several watercolours that are composed of shapes unhinged and floating which I hope evoke mini- environments that are contingent on their negative spaces as much as their positive ones."

Gary Evans