Evoking life’s inconstancy, little is certain in Gracie DeVito’s paintings, which seem to shift in the blink of an eye from abstraction to representation and back again. Even the edges of her shaped canvases seem to sway, slump, wiggle and distend as though struggling against the constraints of conventional rectangularity. As you gaze at their surfaces, faint vestiges of imagery pop from networks of brushstrokes, only to vanish and reassemble into new configurations. Some compositions are readily interpreted as scenes—for instance, in Motion Picture Seaweed (all works 2019), dry brushwork against raw canvas suggests looking out from a cove onto a sunny seashore littered with kelp—but inklings of landscapes, faces, foliage and figures remain fugitive, like barely remembered dreams. In an aleatoric method recalling Surrealist techniques, DeVito often paints on cotton rags on which she has previously wiped brushes, allowing imagery to emerge spontaneously from byproducts of pictures already painted. Situationist Hiker (pictured above) appears to have been painted in that way, with brushstrokes layered over delicately incised cloth on panel. The most definite imagery is found in Bookies in the Garden, where two figures appear on the verge of engulfment by a dark nebulous atmosphere.

Overduin & Co.
6693 Sunset Boulevard
Los Angeles, CA 90028
Show runs through Mar. 28