Portals at Hidell Brooks Gallery

Lemons, 46x36,” 2019

Christopher Terry’s paintings are showing currently at Hidell Brooks Gallery in Charlotte, NC. The show includes about fifteen new works and will run through February 21, 2020. Terry had the following to say about the new work for the show:

Recently I’ve focused my paintings almost exclusively on the idea of passage from one space into another. This isn't a new idea for me, but this current group of paintings has allowed the landscape, or in some cases, an implied exterior space, to take on more significance than in previous explorations.

I’ve always admired the way that painters as diverse as Raphael, Bonnard or Fairfield Porter have used the window motif. With it, they can explore the contrast between nature and our manufactured environment, the way light animates an interior space, or the theme of isolation and separation. My own use of the window builds on these ideas, but I’m also excited by the way that I can use the brush, my own invention, and color in the exterior passages of the paintings. In some paintings, the portals I present to the viewer remain sealed and they offer little more than an opportunity for the viewer to imagine what might be behind a drawn curtain or a closed door. But where the landscape is allowed to intrude on the meditative silence of the interior, I enjoy the freedom the landscape allows me. Unlike the relative precision I apply to the interior space, the landscape enables me to explore very different painting conventions.

The results are most often paintings in which the viewer feels enclosed or even compressed by the interior space. The glimpse afforded of the outside world feels to me like an escape. It’s an escape for the viewer, where they can imagine the sounds and activities of the natural world, but it’s also an escape for me as the painter. The landscape releases me to use more expressive marks, higher intensity color, and gives free rein to my imagination in inventing the landscape forms. The framing device of the window or doorway keeps the vigor of nature under my control and striking the balance between interior and exterior is an intriguing puzzle that continues to engage me.

Chris Terry 2020