Philip Martin Gallery is delighted to present, "Turn," a solo exhibition of new paintings by Holly Coulis. Turn can mean a rotation, a transformation, a change of direction. Coulis's new paintings cleverly play with this idea- a simple shift enacted by form or mind. 

The paintings present, at first glance, arrangements of everyday objects - vases, wine glasses, fruit, cats. Often beginning with small sketches, Coulis builds compositions of intersecting planes and multiple perspectives. The paintings are slowly developed with attention to color, light, and space; elevating and challenging our perception of the recognizable. Objects are viewed from the side and above- sometimes overlapping, sometimes encompassing one another, sometimes rotating with a finely tuned rhythm. Shifting scale and implied movement disrupt the inherent stillness of the arrangements or paintings themselves. 
 
Edges of objects buzz with an optical energy. Drybrush texture and layered color give the linear elements a remarkable visual intensity. The focus on these contours heightens the interconnection between objects, the areas that surround them, and even the viewer. Both positive and negative spaces have equal importance- the material and immaterial are simultaneously crucial. Several of the paintings, titled Cat as Universe…, depict a cat linked to a web of planets, fruits, objects, shapes. The term universe here seems to imply the totality of existing things, which feels present in the paintings. Her work taps into a connection between the very small and the infinite.
 
Large swaths of flat color have an implied depth; foreground and background are always in flux. Her accomplished and unexpected color sense give the paintings a glow and an uncanny adjacency to the world as we know it. Stylistically, the paintings sit at an intersection between Pop Art, Abstraction, and 20th Century still life. Shades of Patrick Caulfield, Ettore Stottsass, and Juan Gris sit beneath her surfaces. There are also hints of Italian futurism in the graphic implications of movement and rotation. Her pictorial structure never actually rests- the still lives are everything but fixed.