Larissa Goldston Gallery is pleased to present Thomas Brouillette’s first solo gallery exhibition in New York. The exhibition will be on view from September 8th through October 6th. There will be a reception for the artist on September 8th from 6 to 8pm.

In these recent paintings, Brouillette uses a wide-ranging palette of vivid, pale, and muted colors. At a glance, the light of these paintings seems to encourage an immediate, even easy “reading” of familiar subject matter, but further investigation imparts a sense of disorientation or disbelief. With skewed perspectives and elusive details, the artist’s compelling use of color and light engages the viewer in a deeper struggle to decipher what is off, missing, abstracted, or unsettling about the pictures. By pushing the limits of what is acceptable to maintain an illusion of real space, shifting surfaces of paint befuddle what the eye believes to be true.

Brouillette’s work portrays easily identifiable imagery: delectable wedding cakes, a monumental sculpture of a horse and rider (in this case frosted with snow), a rubber glove, a swag of flowers, a series of fountains. The shadows in the center of a stately Wedgwood-blue wedding cake are real (cast from three-dimensional beads of paint), but match illusionistic shadows painted on either side of the cake. Indeed, the very color of the cake, which we read as blue, is actually tri-color (blue at left, orange/pink at right, and grey in the middle). In other paintings, glossy or shiny ribbons are surreptitiously painted with matte color, while flat backgrounds or shadows are rendered with gloss paint. This study in opposites works against naturalistic illumination. The result is that as time passes and one walks by these paintings, the shadows may disappear or fade. The glossy elements shift and change, and, suddenly, the objects or the background may look more real.

Thomas Brouillette was the 2006 recipient of the Rema Hort Mann Foundation Visual Arts Grant , and was awarded the Marie Walsh Sharpe Foundation Grant in 2003. Brouillette received his MFA degree from Bard College, and holds a BFA degree from the University of California, Berkeley. He lives and works in New York City. Brouillette has had solo exhibitions at White Columns in New York and Galleria Marabini in Bologna, Italy, and his work has been included in several group shows over the past 5 years.