Two painting shows at Lora Schlesinger Gallery register as pensive pictorial journals of events both experienced and imagined. Including still lifes, figures, landscapes, and combinations thereof, the easel-sized scenes in Roberto Gil de Montes‘ show titled “Moments” range from mundane to momentous. Their initial semblances of conventionality ensconce stirring evocations. With commensurate delicacy he materializes bloodied faces and vases of flowers. There are funerals, weddings, and parties. Celebrations invariably seem more grave than convivial. In Wedding (2017, pictured above), a bride stands alone on a beach, phantasmal against a brilliant scarlet sky peppered with an avian pyrotechnic. A plethora of artistic legacies coalesce into Gil de Montes’ creamy veils of paint, evoking a mixture of Surrealism, southern California plein air, Bay area figuration, and Chicano muralism alongside Mexican retablo and ex-voto traditions. In works such as Post-Fiesta (2017), the curious unease underlying festivity connotes disquieting current events in the U.S. and Mexico while evoking the timeless, placeless sense of disheartening following any holiday. In the smaller gallery, dreamy darkness and Latin American life also permeate Ann Chamberlin‘s show whose title, “Around and Around,” betokens the serpentine movement and manifold perspectives of her absorbing M.C. Escher-like spaces populated by painters, carnies, nudes, sailors, and mermaids. Works such as Butterflies Flap their Wings (2017) and Bitchy Mermaids (2014) recall Judith Linhares and Katherine Bradford; but Chamberlin’s painterly voice is singular. Gallery walls seem to expand under the imaginative intricacy of these two shows.

Lora Schlesinger Gallery
2525 Michigan Ave., # B5b
Santa Monica, CA 90404
Shows run through Apr. 7