This is the gallery’s first solo exhibition of abstract paintings and drawings by Rob Nadeau. This new body of work unveils the artist’s emphasis upon process and materiality as a means to play with conventional pictorial space.

Nadeau’s work challenges stylistic boundaries, focusing upon picture-making as a process of continual invention. Over the past year, Nadeau has concentrated on a daily routine of rendering each hieroglyph in his vocabulary, one 5×7 inch drawing at a time. Through a stream of conscious, non-strategic outpouring of ideas, his language – a combination of line, color and material – evolves into an expansive, rambling library of the internal and intangible. Minimalism’s simplicity and clarity play a large and vital role as a multitude of influences coalesce into succinct, and often beautiful, passages.

This warehouse of ideas, when seen together, begins to create a narrative full of humor, contemplation, and discovery. The raw sensibility of the drawings is amplified in the paintings, where quick gestures, bleeding edges and stratified layers of paint create dynamic surfaces and unexpected compositions. Nadeau’s evolving lexicon of painterly events gather, stack, rupture, and propagate to develop cross sections of an animated, abstract world, where viewing becomes less of a meditation and more of a visceral and active experience.