TURN Gallery presents RAW INTUITION, a two person exhibition with artists Mason Saltarrelli and Chuck Manion. Though radically different, Mason Saltarrelli and Chuck Manion share a common thread - raw intuition.


Mason Saltarrelli combines drawing and painting using oils, pencil, gouache and spray. His instinctive undercurrents, seemingly childlike, are absolute sophistication. Drawing from the personal as well as the Folktales of his New Orleans heritage, Mason Saltarrelli's abstract narratives are rendered from his "gut" rather than from mannered control. His canvas starts with paper which Mason Saltarrelli has carefully weathered, stained, and sometimes cuts and pastes back together. Mason Saltarrelli's colored dots, lyrical lines and suggestive smudges create a subtle storytelling, an abstract map of ghostlike figures which ignite against his aged paper. Mason Saltarrelli's strength is not only in what he paints, but the silent restraint of his negative space.


Chuck Manion's art lies between painting and sculpture. Chuck Manion seems to build his paintings from the inside out, where the picture transcends to a finished piece with a life of its own. His frames are made from found wood then draped in burlap or stretched with mosquito netting. He builds his surface with oils or gold leaf, then leaves raw netting exposed in various shapes which under lights give an illusion of a wall painting underneath it. Chuck Manion's work is a kind of playful dance between gesture and structure.


PRESS

Vice, January 4, 2016