SCott Belville | Painting in reverse
Exhibition Dates: September 14 – December 20, 2018
Sandler Hudson Gallery is pleased to present Scott Belville’s latest series of paintings: Painting in Reverse. Belville’s intricate and beautifully executed work captures the essence of our tumultuous age, while providing a richness that is more timeless than simple commentary.
Trompe l’oeil describes a “trick” in painting. What seems real is, in fact, fake. Belville utilizes this difficult strategy with incredible skill to create a behind-the-scenes look at the process of a painter. Canvases rest on easels, are hung on walls and sometimes held by hands. They often present pastoral scenes, sometimes flowers. Paintings that should affirm permanence in some way appear covered in torn magazine cuttings or old photographs taped to their surfaces and the surrounding walls that fill Belville’s real-life canvases.
What we are left to contemplate is a puzzle involving the processes by which we see, hear, read, and feel. These paintings, like contemporary life, allow dichotomies like real/unreal, fake/true to collapse inward, no longer distinguishable. Our senses, by which we understand stimuli from the outside world, are being played with. Belville’s paintings force us to question the ease with which we receive knowledge. They ask us to ask ourselves, “What is knowledge that does not make sense?”
Belville’s sometimes-chaotic pop-culture imagery belies a deep tenderness that does not allow these paintings to serve as a cynical critique of our times. The confusion they present is due to a representation of incompleteness. The paintings are unfolding. They point to the future and invite us to engage with the creative process through which it will arise.
SCOTT BELVILLE (b. Georgia) received his M.F.A. in painting at Ohio University in 1977. He currently teaches art at The University of Georgia in Athens, GA. Solo exhibitions include the Jus de Pomme Gallery, New York, NY; Monique Knowlton Gallery, New York, NY; P.S. #1, New York, NY; Greenville County Museum of Art, Greenville, SC; Delaware Art Museum, Wilmington, DE and the High Museum of Art. He has received many awards and grants including two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships in painting, a Georgia Council for the Arts Grant in 1993, and a Ford Foundation Grant in 1979. His work is included in numerous private and public collections, including the permanent collection at MOCA GA; the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN; Greenville County Museum of Art, Greenville, SC; State Collection of South Carolina; King and Spalding, Atlanta, GA.