Rest is Smoke: Munro Galloway

Munro Galloway’s exhibition of new paintings, Rest is Smoke, takes its title from a sentence inscribed into Andrea Mantegna’s painting Saint Sebastian, in Venice, Italy: “Nothing is stable except the divine, the rest is smoke.” Returning to Los Angeles after a year of living in Europe, Galloway became newly attuned to the climatic conditions of Southern California—heat, wind, rain, fire and smoke. Back in the studio, he began experimenting with gestural painting in ink on paper, and then oil on canvas, reproducing cloud and smoke effects, layering and scraping to create lightness and density, and finding temperature differences in value and color. The gestural quality of the canvases invokes painters from Tintoretto and Turner to Richard Diebenkorn and Joan Mitchell, who sought to capture atmospheric effects and movement in traces of paint. Rest is Smoke invokes both the fleeting act of painting, and a warning: to rest is to disappear, to act is to remain.