Phantasma
detail from the painting Snake Bit
“Phantasma is an exhibition of hypnagogic paintings by Bruce Riley. The paintings range in date from a couple of years before the Coronavirus to the present. Riley’s luminous visions blur the line between abstraction and figuration. Working without preconception, his paintings are developed as much as painted. With no sketches to guide him, Riley works on multiple paintings that help to define each other as they grow.”
The exhibition is at the Leslie Wolfe Gallery at the Old Town Triangle Center, 1763 North Park Ave. Chicago, IL 60614 312-337-1938
The exhibition is open on August 9th through September 6.
The opening is on August 16, 6 - 8 pm
There is a gallery talk on August 31, 12 – 1 pm
Gallery hours: Tuesday – Friday 10 – 5 pm, Saturday 10 – 1 pm
I’m excited to get paintings back that were stalled in the Netherlands due to the pandemic. The plague hit while a sea crate of art was in the Atlantic. Some of these works have never been exhibited.
I call this show Phantasma for its sense of mystery. The title Phantasma holds for me a touch of the fantastic of an apparition seen but not understood. I describe the paintings as hypnagogic to emphasize their hallucinatory nature. Hypnagogic images have also been described as meaningless, lying between waking and dreaming.
Except for a few 2024 pieces, most of the paintings use layers of clear resin to separate paint layers. The clear resin allows light to reflect up through glazes into the viewer’s eyes. The clear layers also add physical depth to the painting, casting shadows and creating a visual shift as the overlapping layers are seen from different angles.
With this body of work, I’ve been painting flat on panels with self-leveling water-based media for the most part. Resin is used as a leveler, separator and as a clear “gesso”. The first layer usually covers large areas in spreading blooms. After this layer dries, I pour a clear resin layer. On this dried second layer my marks hover above the blooms. This process is repeated depending on the needs of the painting.
I think this way of working with transparent resin layers is coming to an end. My newest paintings use no resin, making them one paint layer with a matte surface. I still have some resin pieces in progress that seem to bridge this transition, but I haven’t started any new ones.