Rare is pleased to announce a solo exhibition of new paintings and drawings by Francesco Longenecker. The show, titled Animated Landscapes, marks the artist’s second one-person exhibition with the gallery.

Longenecker’s paintings reveal fragmented landscapes and architectural forms that appear to be simultaneously growing and decomposing, continuously morphing before the viewers’ eyes like jigsaw puzzles in a state of constant flux. Similarly, his multi-layered ink & graphite drawings demonstrate a chaotic interchangeability of positive and negative space that results in a frantic visual chase where images recede just as they are being perceived.

Animated by multiple perspectives, the artist’s paintings convey shape-shifting qualities. They offer Technicolor swamps and gardens populated by implied structures that alternate between deep and collapsed space. Plant-like armatures rise and melt into one another, frozen in some spaces and thawed out in others. Backgrounds and foregrounds spill into each other. Objects and the landscapes in which they are embedded appear to have been shredded and woven back together to create composite terrains, at once familiar and yet inscrutable.