"True Paint" Three Painters at Jay Grimm Gallery, Chelsea

Jay Grimm Gallery at 505 West 28th Street, New York, will hold an exhibition of Charles Andresen, Tracy Miller and Santi Moix from January 17th through February 16th, 2002. The exhibition was curated by Andrew Chesler. There will be a reception at the gallery on Thursday, January 17th from 6-8 P.M.

Few things are more true - more honest, more impassioned - than the application of thick paint to a canvas. "True Paint"explores the current state of this truth through the work of three contemporary artists. Reflecting the panoply of painting today, each artist works in a distinct style: pure abstraction, biomorphism, and representation. Each has clear ties to a master who also believed in the physical and transformative abilities of paint, and each conveys that in his/her work, paint itself is as important as any image that paint can make.

Charles Andresen "Words in Color", 2002 acrylic on canvas 58 x 48 inches

Charles Andresen's impasto-in-the-extreme canvases are steeped in the legacy of Richard Pousette-Dart and Jackson Pollock's all-over compositions. He adds a corporeality of plastic paint to spatial compression, thereby acknowledging the high volume of data and reliance on hybrid materials in the contemporary world. As Andresen's swirls of chemical colors lead the viewer into a haze of synthetic, designer drug psychedelia, his paintings achieve equilibrium between form and formlessness.

Tracy Miller, Donuts, 1997, oil on canvas, 84 x 72"

Tracy Miller paints objects of quotidian middle-American life intermixed with the occasional celebrated luxury, such as a lobster or candelabra. For her, painting is as primal an act as meal preparation: the manipulation of materials that produce an essential satisfaction. While rooted in the earthy still lifes of Chaim Soutine, she updates the genre by painting with the unsentimental directness of the processed, mass-produced food products she depicts.

Santi Moix, Place V: Orly, 1999-2000, oil on linen, 50 x 60 1/4"

Painter Santi Moix' work is inspired and informed by personal memory and universal experience. Neither pure abstraction nor strictly observed from life, his lush paint and saturated colors depict a sky and sea-filled biomorphic world that alludes to metaphysical aspects of color field painting and the surrealist based, straight-from-the-unconscious methodology of Joan Miró.

Curator Andrew Chesler is a New York-based artist whose next one-person show will take place at g-module in Paris, France in October. Previously he curated "Almost Something: Depictive Abstraction", at Catherine Moore Fine Art in New York.

Reception Thursday January 17th 20002

Jay Grimm Gallery, "True Paint" Reception, 1/19/2002/ Charles Andresen's work "Words in Colour" in the background.

Painter Santi Moix at the opening reception.

Curator Andrew Chesler in front of Santi Moix' "Place V: Orly".

Gallery hours are Tuesday through Saturday, 11-6 P.M. and by appointment. Please call the Gallery at 212.564.7662 for images or additional information, or visit our website at www.jaygrimm.com.