Jeff Bailey Gallery is pleased to present Half Colors of Quarter Things, a group exhibition featuring the work of Chris Gentile, Zohar Lazar and Joshua Marsh.

Gentile, Lazar and Marsh each offer a unique visual experience, employing the underlying principles of still life. Distinguished by a particular medium and the vernacular approach inherent to that medium, these artists combine and arrange signature pictorial elements, engaging them on both formal and metaphoric levels. The title of the exhibition, Half Colors of Quarter Things (taken from the Wallace Stevens poem, The Motive for Metaphor), seemingly refers to the incapacity of language to fully describe the physical world. Similarly, the works included in this exhibition resist written or verbal interpretation, evoking instead a sensation closer to déjà vu.

In the vibrant oil paintings of Joshua Marsh, in depth observations of water pitchers result in mutations of surface, depth, color and shape. The objects are reduced to the basic shapes that define them as a compositional tool, creating layered semi-abstract forms. The ellipse, for example, becomes an important focus, a bridge between the positive and negative space of the subject. In Pitcher (blue), the silhouette of the pitcher is suggested only by the shapes and colors of the environment reflected on, and seen through, its surface.

In the photographs of Chris Gentile, the semiotic efficiency of commercial photography is paired with the technical capacity of a sculptor or painter. Presented as allegories of his studio practice, Gentile’s photographs investigate the romantic notion of the artist as alchemist. End Times / Amend Times #7 features a blue container elevated by a crudely constructed scaffold, isolated and centered against a black background and resting on a mysterious support. This overall scenario of disparate parts creates both a unique structure and new image.

Zohar Lazar’s gouache paintings mix art historical appropriations, car wrecks and cartoons. Nature and man’s interference collide into random and accidental acts of creativity. In Twang, various flowers, a bird and roadside detritus join together in a precarious balance.

Chris Gentile has had two solo exhibitions with the gallery and he will have a solo exhibition at The Peeler Art Center, Depauw University, in Greencastle, Indiana in spring 2009. His work has been exhibited at Gregory Lind Gallery, San Francisco (solo); Second Street Gallery, Charlottesville, Virginia (solo) and in group exhibitions at Rotunda Gallery and Jessica Murray Projects, Brooklyn. He received his MFA from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill and lives in Brooklyn. Zohar Lazar attended Parsons School of Design and Eugene Lang College, New York. He has taught at the School of Visual Arts and has been a regular contributor to The New Yorker since 1997. He lives in upstate New York. Joshua Marsh has exhibited his work in New York at Space B Gallery, Gallery MC, Morgan Lehman Gallery, and Fredericks & Freiser. He received his MFA from Yale University and lives in West Chester, Pennsylvania. All three artists have been featured in group exhibitions at Geoffrey Young Gallery, Great Barrington, Massachusetts.