Opposite: Jay Bailey, Dust Storm in the Petrified Forest, oil on canvas, 40” × 30”. Above, Francis DiFronzo, Where We Are Now (Part 2), oil over gouache and watercolor on panel, 36” × 72”. Below, Jeremy Mann, Composition 179, oil on panel, 48” × 48”.
Crossroads
H
ow do we respond to the world around us? More important, how do artists of our time respond to it? Not just the world we have created—the human world of bustling streets, cell-phone towers, multilane highways, and throngs of people going about their daily lives—but also the world we see beyond this: the permanence behind the fleeting, the physical realm of nature that serves as backdrop and stage to our physical lives. Fittingly for the turn of the New Year, Evoke Contemporary has curated Crossroads, an exhibition of contemporary landscape painting from three distinctly different voices: perennial
gallery favorites Jeremy Mann and Francis DiFronzo, and an invited guest: Jay Bailey. Each artist is working toward a personal vision in his work, and each has been creating that vision through the past few years, when the landscapes of the external world has come to symbolize so much more than we can see on the surface.
what surrounds them—what’s seen above the horizon. In DiFronzo’s painting Where Are We Now, Part II, a lone boxcar sits in the middle of the desert, its sliding doors open on both sides to reveal the sprawling cloud shapes seen at sunset in the desert southwest. The boxcar is completed in fine detail, including
Francis DiFronzo is well known for his paintings of the trains, boats, cars, and abandoned hotel signs he finds in the far reaches of the Mojave Desert. A resident of Southern California, DiFronzo travels to this large, expansive space to find unusual relics and objects that seem to be leftovers of past lives. While at first glance one might think that these paintings are about the objects that typically occupy the foreground, for DiFronzo the work is actually about E VO K AT I O N
JANUARY 2022
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