Jon Pestoni’s (1969, USA) optically charged paintings each layer several compositional orders — geometric forms, figuration, graphic art, and Abstract Expressionism — such that they become an inextricable contradiction. The surfaces of his work are rich with drips, splashes, dry on dry brush strokes and paint mixed with cat litter, all in varying degrees of transparency. At the edges accrue fragments of cartoon figures and illustrations like bits of paper escaping from a file folder. They obstruct the free deployment of paint and add a deeply psychological dimension to his painting.

Rezi Van Lankveld (NL, 1973) is known for her small and medium sized paintings. They have a presence and immediacy that can be described for lack of better words as an affectionate infinity, a borderless elsewhere. The complex and contradictory interplay of immaterial paint, formal play, figurative hints and fauvist palette are created through Van Lankveld process of pouring paint loosely from a can onto the canvas, then pushing and pulling the paint until compositions emerge. Her brightened liquid palette recalls the work of Georgia O’keefe or Helen Frankenthaler, while her biomorphic shapes come closer to El Greco and Philip Guston. Soft, fluid and porous her works are tangible mirages.

Ambera Wellmann’s (CA, 1982) uncanny clair-obscur paintings are symbolical compressions addressing the historical as much as the present. She looks at magazines and art history through an allegorical lens and finds iconographic material that allows her to speak from memory and imagination from a third person perspective. Wellmann’s pictures of human bodies or still life compositions are both familiar and strangely alienating. Mannerist, slight deformations in otherwise familiar scenes lead us away from the center. In all of them, fragmentation gnaws as a slowly eroding force that inevitably makes flesh become cold, glow become pale and sweat become tears. On the other side of life and alienation, death reveals itself as a driving force. In the work of Wellmann, these dynamics appear as seen from a feminist perspective. By exploring the historical genres of still life, erotic rêverie and allegory, she finds ways to make her own, deeply lived, the eroticism that has imagined, challenged and described woman throughout the ages.