Sideshow gallery is pleased to present Ignorance and Bliss, an exhibition of paintings by Joel Longenecker, described by noted critic and curator Lilly Wei as the work of an “artist who is at the top of his form in an exhilarating give and take with his medium.”

The artist creates dense and rigorous paintings by laying down thick slabs of paint, letting them dry and crust over, scraping them down, then repeating this process again and again, much like a landscape being formed over time. He builds the structure of the paintings from the ground up, creating topographical strata. For Longenecker, scraping through the congealed paint-the consistency of mud-is like plowing through a field. Each painting is a unique ecological environment in which layers run deep and history is palpable. Paint becomes an endlessly flexible and malleable material – thin to thick, wet-on-wet, and scumbled-over-dry—revealing both the nature of paint and paint as nature.

A central theme of this work is the juxtaposition of its weighty materiality with a sense of levitation and lightness. As he wrestles with contradictory and opposing forces-growth and decay, build-up and erosion, creation and destruction, heaviness and lightness-Longenecker underscores the inherent drama of the indeterminate.

What sets Longenecker apart is his ability to create works of intensity and powerful physical presence—works that seek a kind of transcendence in which the physical properties of pigment and oil melt away and become something else: light, air, mass, space. Longenecker says, “I work until the paint falls into its `destined’ place and becomes its own corporeal subject.” The drama of that experience is his true subject.

This exhibition is accompanied by a full-color catalogue with essay by Lilly Wei.