Gregory Amenoff’s work is rooted in the long tradition of landscape painting. These are not paintings of specific observed sites; instead the psychic possibilities of imagined places are described. The viewpoint is of an implied figure looking into a highly imagined world. The world is described in terms of light and atmosphere with a sometimes ecstatic intention. The curator Rachel Lafo, has written, “In his work the outer world is internalized; the inner world is manifested in visible form.”

Bodies of water (often the sea), mountains, and other rocky and imagined protuberances—places where violent tectonic action has occurred-often describe spatial experience. Also present are highly structural foregrounded shapes-faceted forms that muscularly twist their way through and into the pictorial space. These objects of vernacular architecture insert themselves into sublime landscapes acting as vehicles of bisecting aggression. Trevor Winkfield writes in his essay, “A roiling synaesthesia results, one in which animal becomes vegetable, and this in turn solidifies into mineral. Nothing is settled, everything heaves. The checkered snail in the foreground could also be a root, and the slate slab it lurks behind is more likely to be a watery inlet. Nocturnal tones co-exist with buttered sunlight … or are those streaks a loaf of honey lodged in amber?”