Elizabeth Leach Gallery is pleased to present Rest is Smoke, an exhibition of new paintings by Munro Galloway. The new paintings by Galloway contain layered references to art history, personal memories, and the dramatic, shifting landscape and climate of America’s West Coast.
The exhibition’s title is derived from a sentence Galloway observed inscribed in Andrea Mantegna’s sixteenth-century painting of Saint Sebastian, in Venice, Italy: “Nothing is stable except the divine, the rest is smoke.” Having returned to Los Angeles after a year living in Europe, Galloway found himself newly attuned to the climatic conditions of Southern California: heat, wind, rain, and smoke. These natural phenomena find their way into Galloway’s paintings, in which he reproduces cloud and smoke effects, creating lightness and density, and finding temperature differences in value and color.
A central idea in Rest is Smoke is transmutation: the shift from one state or form into another. Galloway’s paintings are made through a process of building up and removing many layers of richly pigmented paint. Through this process, natural forms and compositions derived from varied sources, including historic seascapes and observations of clouds, storms, fires, sunrises and sunsets, emerge and dissolve into expressive marks, hovering between representation and abstraction.
Certain paintings, such as From an Island, feature concrete references to place, while others such as Dissolve in Rain are more expressionistic and evocative of action or feeling. Elements of ships lost in storms, including sail forms, storm clouds, and reflections of light on water are both figurative and symbolic, reflecting the artist’s longstanding connection to the sea and as a metaphor for the painting process. The gestural quality of the canvases invokes painters from Tintoretto and Turner to Arthur Dove and Joan Mitchell, who sought to capture atmospheric effects and movement in traces of paint.
The new works in Rest is Smoke invoke both the fleeting act of painting and a quiet warning: to rest is to disappear; to act is to remain.
