“The Bold and The Beautiful”
Art Exhibit featuring Starlight's Andy Calderon with James Marino and Benjamin Brauen, Jr. from Autism Services Inc.
Also Exhibited: Debbie Medwin, Jeremy Pratt, and Ron Steele

Starlight Studio & Art Gallery
340 Delaware Avenue, Buffalo, NY 14202
Friday, June 23rd, 2017
6-9pm
Food for purchase by Kiosko Latino

On-View through September 1st, 2017Though the subject matter has shifted over the years, Andy Calderon's work finds continuity in flamboyant color.  What might be, in a more straightforward depiction, subdued and dull is substituted with stronger, more essential hues.  And as his color choices avoid digression, so do his compositions.  Spatial development is restricted so that the subjects of the works are seemingly lined up for the viewer, presented more as items laid out for taking inventory than as a scene with fore-, middle-, and backgrounds.  For this exhibition, Andy will be showing two exuberant portraits and a small series of plant and foliage drawings.

 

James Marino's color choices are notably more restrained than Calderon's, opting typically for a few colors hovering around a green/blue palette.  The contour line work is looser, as if only marginally obligated to the image.  He returns to common themes of glamorous culture and cars on one hand and notable civic or natural monuments on the other, as evidenced in this show by his paintings of Niagara Falls, Mount Rushmore, and of a beaming high-society type posing with a classic car.

 

Benjamin Braun's work goes between image and abstraction, but each is handled with similar patchwork structures.  In the abstractions, this patchwork quality plays out in the classic push/pull sense as outlined by Hans Hoffman: each block of tone and color readjusting the compositional balance of the piece.  The shapes are amorphous and the borders imperfect, making the math of the painting more complicated.  As figurative work, that patchwork overlooks smaller details and instead develops mass.  The patches reluctantly abide by the image, scantily defining form while seemingly trying to break from it and head back toward abstraction.