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MIXED GREENS - Howard Fonda, Leigh Tarentino

349 views · Published 22 March 2014 · 5:39 · Indexed 8 November 2026

Channel: NYC GALLERY OPENINGS · 2014 · Entertainment

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HOWARD FONDA
EVERYTHING AND NOTHING
MARCH 20--APRIL 19, 2014
OPENING: THURSDAY, MARCH 20, 6-8PM

Mixed Greens is thrilled to announce Howard Fonda's sixth solo exhibition 
with the gallery. In Everything and Nothing, he will exhibit a new series of 
largely autobiographical oil paintings and drawings. For Fonda, painting is 
a spiritual outpost, with the finished works existing as byproducts of 
instinct, thought, contemplation, and struggle. 

Miguel: "So what's this all about?"
Howard: "What? The painting? Oh, it's everything and nothing."
Miguel: "Oh. Right. Of course."
Howard: "Primum viveri deinde philosophare."*
Miguel: "Word."

Sometimes purely formal, other times historical, philosophical, or 
metaphysical, Fonda's paintings freely alternate between abstraction and 
figuration. Yet, Fonda is less interested in distinguishing styles than in the 
quest for sincerity and truth in mark making. In each body of work, he is 
attempting to understand the world around him through the discovery 
within his serious painting practice. He is interested in the formal 
architecture of a painting—color, line, viscosity of the paint, and 
composition—as well as a purposeful narrative. The narrative is often 
demanding, however, forcing the viewer to find content in form, and sense 
the thoughtfulness, awkward beauty, and wonder present in a space where 
intuition and painstaking intention meet.

When asked, Fonda reveals that his time in the studio is a never-ending 
effort to make a good painting without being gratuitous, self-absorbed, 
trendy, market-driven, or lucky. It is a lifetime's goal to which Fonda is 
wholly dedicated. His marks are self-aware, direct, and playful, often 
including hidden text, poetic moments with his family, successes, and 
failures. His diverse influences currently include Sophie von Hellerman, 
Mari Eastman, Merlin James, Matisse, Henry Miller, Thelonious Monk, 
Emerson, Native American art and culture, African American social history, 
his wife, and his son. These canvases reveal a series of figures dissolving 
into and emerging from color -- the slippage between art and life. 


LEIGH TARENTINO
THE NIGHT HOURS
MARCH 20--MAY 23, 2014
OPENING: THURSDAY, MARCH 20, 6-8PM

Mixed Greens is thrilled to present an ambitious, site-specific window 
installation by Providence-based artist Leigh Tarentino. Known for her 
works on paper and digital prints, Tarentino translates the constructed 
landscape to dynamically layered fabric panels in our 26th Street windows.

For the last decade, Tarentino used watercolor and ink to render delicate, 
and often haunting, representations of our manmade landscape. Signs of 
technology and suburban sprawl such as power lines, highway signs, 
bridges, and overpasses became elegant compositions in Tarentino's 
drawings, inspiring viewers to rethink roadside elements often considered 
to be eye sores. Since 2012, she focused her attention on suburbia itself. 
Graphic paintings of leafless trees wrapped in holiday lights highlight the 
eerie loneliness of the nocturnal, winter landscape. The materiality of the 
painted surface and the black and white palette capture the starkness of 
the moonlight on snow.

For The Night Hours, Tarentino will hang layers of fabric that have been 
painted, silkscreened, and digitally printed with monochrome images. The 
various opaque and transparent panels are inspired by her nighttime 
suburban exploration of landscape, single-family houses, and gardens, 
illuminated by artificial light. The curtain-like quality of the collaged fabric 
references both the site-specificity of the piece and the archetype of 
home. Rippling, slightly distorted, and moving ever so slightly, The Night 
Hours gives an uncanny perspective on suburban ideas of comfort, 
security, and privacy. Viewers are invited to peer up at windows within 
windows whose odd angles disrupt a clear vision of suburban well-being.

Music by:
Chill Carrier - A New Day

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