Cerulean Arts to open "The Air is Thick" ~ A Show of Four Painters

Written by rubin Friday, 27 March 2009 07:30

Philadelphia,PA - Cerulean Arts is pleased to present 'The Air is Thick', a show of four painters with inventive and unconventional approaches to landscape. The works of Laurie Riccadonna, Christopher Schade, Marc Connor, and Zoe Pettijohn Schade share a density of imagery and emphasis on surface. All four artists live and work in New York City and the surrounding area. Guest curated by Joshua Marsh. On view from April 10 – May 15, 2009 and is free and open to the public. The opening reception is Friday, April 10 from 5-9pm. The artists and guest curator will participate in a “Meet the Artists” event on Sunday, April 26 from 1-4 pm with a gallery talk at 2pm.

With the garden as her implied subject, Laurie Riccadonna’s paintings explore the relationships between landscape and pattern. Fencing, latticework, webs, plant and animal species proliferate her surfaces in an intricate orchestration, like wild wallpaper. Visual expectations implied by regularities of pattern are subverted, broken, and reintegrated into neighboring systems of plan or ecology, creating a universe that parallels the complexities and intersections of the natural and domestic worlds.

Marc Connor’s paintings explore the ancient topography of the Upstate New York landscape. While his paintings embody the visual phenomena of seasonal color, transitory qualities of daylight, and undulating forms of the landscape, they simultaneously have the insistent material presence of sculpture. The painting as object develops its own topography as he builds each observation with the heavy substance of his material. Bulging and undulating with paint across the surfaces, the works transform the original rectangle into the irregular shapes of heaped paint.

Christopher Schade gathers a deluge of visual experiences, languages and genres under the unifying structure of the island. Suggestive of landscape and seascape, human and animal forms, made with diverse ways of painting that span the gestural and hard-edged, the highly detailed and broadly generalized, the symbolic and perceptual, the abstract and representational, his paintings defy singular categorization. Traditional pictorial and visual anchors such as horizon lines and cast shadows weave through the sometimes disjunctive, sometimes gradually transitioned multiplicity of languages and spaces.

Zoe Petijohnn Schade adopts the traditional materials of painting textile designs in gouache to develop her layered works of pattern and imagery. Gold leaf accompanies the mineral qualities of gouache to create shining threads of perspective lines in “Fathers Space”, leading the viewer to its deeply expansive horizons from highly detailed patterned surfaces. Embedded and abstracted imagery rises to the surface of her painting like memories: pyramids, geometries, and astronauts floating in celestial skies. The long look of a viewer is rewarded by recognition of the larger geometries that structure her works into repeated patterns.

Cerulean Arts’ mission is to cultivate an appreciation for art by holding exhibitions, offering unique decorative and fine art for sale and providing art instruction for personal fulfillment. Located at 1355 Ridge Avenue—where Ridge Avenue, Fairmount Avenue and Broad Street all intersect—Cerulean Arts is poised to become an anchor of Philadelphia’s Avenue of the Arts North. For more information, contact Tina Rocha at 267-514-8647 or This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .

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