NEW YORK, NY.- Allegra LaViola Gallery
presents Allison Gildersleeve and Erik Jeor, a twoperson show comprised of works on paper and canvas.
To enter the worlds of Allison Gildersleeve and Erik Jeor one must abandon a sense of gravity and time. Light pours from unlikely sources, and memory cannot be trusted. The beauty that lures one into the work is chilled by an edge of darkness, and though we pause to admire the scenery, we might not want to linger too long. Allison Gildersleeves paintings are deceptively alluring roads wind through bright clusters of trees, inviting us to pause and enjoy our surroundings. Beyond the branches we glimpse a house, as the pitch of a roof or edge of a window peeks through the woods. Though the house speaks of humans we never encounter a person, and the world remains veiled in a brilliant mystery. Gildersleeve paints a type of memory familiar to many, grasping at a time just beyond the edge of claritya haunted space.
Erik Jeors watercolors appear at first as luminous landscapes, occasionally ominous as the lightness trails into an ashen mist. Jeor, immersed from adolescence in the evangelical movement, is constantly threading the gap between the divine and ordinary, the natural and supernatural. His drive towards the sublime comes in the form of a tug of war between seemingly opposed forces. As viewers, we are drawn into this conflict as we follow through the puddled shadows and into the focused radiance.
It is interesting to note that Gildersleeve, an American with no Scandinavian ties, has had such a warm reception in Sweden, Jeors homeland. In a country where light and dark are so important on a daily basis it seems fitting that these two artists have found their way towards a middle ground, where the shadows are numerous but kept at bay.