Douglas Melini
“Landscape Painting”
New York, 515 West 22nd Street
Douglas Melini takes a radical alternative to the blank canvas, making works that are part painting, part sculpture, and part something else altogether. The linen, oil, and acrylic-stained reclaimed wood creations shatter the hierarchy of artwork and its frame; the wood elements of Melini’s paintings are not merely supplementary, but rather integral to the composition itself.
Courtesy of Miles McEnery Gallery
Get up close, and Melini’s patient labor and intimate understanding of his materials are revealed. As Raphael Rubenstein observes in the catalogue essay, “If you were to disentangle and stretch out the strings of paint on the linen squares, they could conceivably be used to fill in the countless thin channels and furrows that scar the surfaces of the wood panels; the countless paint strings in the center are the positive correlative to the negative fissures in the wood.” Reframing natural elements of the landscape and bringing them into the gallery space, Melini’s work successfully blurs the boundaries between art and the context in which it appears.
