Melissa Kretschmer | Li Trincere

About

Colleagues and gallery mates in the 1990s in Julian Pretto’s gallery in New York, both artists explore painted surfaces and supports. Kretschmer excavates the surface and leverages process to reveal literal depth and volume, while Trincere uses subtle transitions of hue and shaped supports to create illusory movement and depth within her compositions.

Melissa Kretschmer’s paintings are generated by her interaction with process and materials.  Dissatisfied with the mere articulation of surface and support, Kretschmer’s subtle layering of plane and radical displacement of edge creates a veiled tension between thick and thin, line and volume, center and periphery.  These excavated complexities establish an ambient visual presence which may be described as ‘more there there’, somewhat akin to hearing the fleeting impression of Erik Satie while immersed in the rush hour cacophony of Union Square.

Li Trincere's paintings examine the formal properties of surface, hue, and shape. First sensed as resolutely flat, finely tuned chroma instantiates fictive depths, and defines spaces both within and around the limits of that immediately seen.  Simple movement is synthesized through clean, elementary, unadorned construction. Trincere’s paintings put hands to familiar structures heard in the raw three chords of rock and roll music, and colored by the transient aesthetics of the street, the club, and the beach.