BRIAN RATTINER

TWO BIRDS IN A PALE SKY

OPENING SATURDAY, 1.22.22 | 11AM – 5PM

ON VIEW UNTIL SATURDAY, 3.5.22

CARVALHO PARK announces the opening of Two Birds in a Pale Sky, marking Brian Rattiner's debut New York solo exhibition. Featuring the largest paintings the artist has realized and shown to date, Rattiner offers the viewer the optical splendor of monumentally-scaled works resounding with the freedom of nature, in their lyrical eruptions of line and color. Suspended in perpetual rhythms and free-flowing intuitive gestures, the works suggest nature’s ever-shifting sublimity and singular balance – there is no sign of conflict. This series emanates what we seek from nature – its charge, the rejuvenating possibilities, the desire to be made anew. 

While categorically landscape painting, it is the sensations across the pictorial planes – ineffable but familiar – that we recognize from the landscape, intuited, and palpably felt through the artist’s synthesist and evocative marks. Fluid scrawls, graffiti-like in lucidity, are ever poised on the cusp of identifiable forms – mountains, fungi, spring’s eager young flowers – but the lexicon of movement, speed and temporality, further establish their connection to the landscape. The works shown in Two Birds in a Pale Sky predominately stem from artist residencies, critical and often pivotal periods of production in the artist’s practice. The settings for these works were mysterious, forested terrains, brimming with anthropomorphism – the first at Anderson Ranch, near Aspen, Colorado, the second in Monson, Maine. 

Rattiner’s ritualistic encircling of snow fields while on residency, or the way in which time is suspended as a snowflake takes an unexpected course, is echoed here. Finally the Spring (2021), painted on translucent pale blue cotton, holds a vision of simultaneity and flux, the moment between seasons. The artist utilized melted snow in the creation of repeated dyed arcs across the lower portion of the work, assimilating the landscape in a manner part impulse, part material investigation, further fusing at its essence, the painting to the time of its making. A blanket of subtly drawn flowers emerges there from this softened field – the trumpeters of spring. 

The most recent works, completed in the weeks leading up to the exhibition, were created in the artist’s Brooklyn studio at the rushing onset of this winter. Of these, the artist writes, “Winter III + Winter IV for me feel like a storm, a precipitation, a coolness, a space to breathe where exhaling, you blow out smoke. It was a celebration of the beginning of winter.”

In Rattiner’s most expansive works, evocations of the landscape are unmoored from the spatial limitations of the picture plane, where all sense of gravity is counterbalanced by a hypnotic feeling of floating. Colossal at over eight square meters, Monk (2021) envelopes the viewer in the radiance of a swirling composition, his or her sphere of vision saturated by a shimmering unbounded language, imparting nature’s spiritual force. 

Seemingly dominated by intuition, these paintings are sensitively considered as the artist connects compositional movement with a strategic use of color. Rattiner introduces a new palette in these works that carries nature’s charge and reverberates with hope, most distinctly in the painting There is Light (2022). The work immediately speaks with glowing yellow and vaporous plumes of cobalt and magenta, interrupted by palimpsests of silver and midnight blue – a hovering, fluid expanse fused with a Twombly-esque linearity. There is a marked authenticity to materials. Rattiner works with as many as eight different mediums for each painting – oil pastel, pigments, color pencil, graphite, marker and salt among them – across fields of satin or hand-dyed cotton or muslin, allowing each to act as it inherently demands.

Brian Rattiner (b. Brooklyn, New York) received his BFA in Painting from the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD). His work has been shown in solo and two-person exhibitions at Carvalho Park, New York, and David B. Smith gallery in Denver. Group shows include those at Ortega y Gasset Projects and Transmitter Gallery in Brooklyn, Susan Eley Fine Art in New York, and the Leroy Neiman Gallery at Columbia University. International exhibitions include Le Coeur project space in Paris and the Anna Nova Gallery and Triumph Gallery in Moscow. Rattiner’s work has been selected for multiple juried exhibitions curated by Kate Mothes, founder of the influential platform Young Space, with guest curator David B. Smith. He has conducted residencies with Anderson Ranch, Colorado; Skopelos Foundation for the Arts in Greece; the Fundación Valparaiso in Mojácar, Spain; with curator Laure Le Baron in Collongues, France; and Alone in the Woods in Lincolnville, Maine. Rattiner lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.