Elliott Green approaches painting with a sense of lightness, curiosity, and tenderness. With expansive depth and a variety of gestures, these images present energy, light, and color in roiling geological and atmospheric settings. Green conquers abstraction by shifting shapes that drift from the moorings of recognizable natural entities—clouds, mountains, and terrains. The elements are often in a state of dispersion, misting off particles into neighboring elements and airspaces around them.
The artist’s most recent body of paintings create a fascinating conversation between abstraction and landscape, completely revolutionizing the established boundaries of the traditional landscape. How can one paint a landscape and make it new? Is landscape, as Green renders it, abstraction pursued by other means?
John Yau writes, “It was apparent that Green was working in a generative place where the tug between representation and abstraction never resolved itself, which is also true of the paintings of Claude Monet and Vincent Van Gogh. Green’s refusal to move definitively towards representation or abstraction has resulted in one of the most interesting and engaging projects undertaken by a contemporary artist exploring the subject of landscape in paint,” Yau continues, “Green deliberately brings multiple applications to bear in a single painting. The result is an entangled, jarring combination of twisting, coiling forms; gradient, monochromatic planes; striated shapes; furling clouds and bulbous silhouettes.”
His euphoric paintings unravel before the viewer, giving the beholder’s imagination permission to wander. The images unfold layer by layer as mountain peaks ascend into sinuous skies. Green manipulates the materiality of oil paint as a means of evoking the tumultuous physicality of nature.
Recent solo exhibitions include Miles McEnery Gallery, New York, NY; “Auto Revisionism,” Pamela Salisbury Gallery, Hudson, NY; “Syncretism,” Peyton Wright Gallery, Santa Fe, NM; “Under the Map Room,” Pierogi, Brooklyn, NY; “Real Atmosphere Imaginary Space,” Hill Gallery, Birmingham, MI; “Reverb,” Jonathan Ferrara Gallery, New Orleans, LA; “Human Nature,” Pierogi, Brooklyn, NY; John Davis Gallery, Hudson, NY; D’Amelio Terras Gallery, New York, NY; Singer Gallery, Denver, CO; Tibor de Nagy, New York, NY; Center for Visual Art and Culture, University of Connecticut, Storrs, CT; Postmasters, New York, NY; Postmasters, New York, NY; Postmasters, New York, NY; Krannert Art Museum, Champaign, IL; I-Space,The University of Illinois, Chicago, IL; Phyllis Kind Gallery, Chicago, IL; Fawbush, New York, NY; Fawbush, New York, NY and Hirschl & Adler Modern, New York, NY.