press release
ron milewicz
second sight
april 13 – may 25, 2024
opening reception: saturday, april 13, 3-6 pm
catalog available with essay by Christina Kee
Elizabeth Harris Gallery is pleased to present Second Sight, an exhibition of paintings by Ron Milewicz. This is his seventh solo show with the gallery.
Numinous silence and light pervade the seemingly ordinary rural settings of Ron Milewicz’s recent paintings, otherworldly visions of actual places set aglow by hidden suns and rising moons. In the face of humanity’s vast and relentless sacrilege of the earth, Milewicz sacralizes the natural world that surrounds him.
The artist pays homage to his woodland motifs in a twofold process. He first makes tonal graphite drawings of trees, meadows, and ponds directly on-site in the lower New York Hudson Valley. He then revisits those carefully observed, rigorously constructed, and subtly nuanced images in the studio using oil or egg tempera paint on linen or panel. With their embrace of both plein air and studio practices, Milewicz’s compositions are imprinted with a diverse lineage. The perceptual paintings of Corot and the Barbizon School come to mind as readily as the visionary landscapes of Samuel Palmer, George Inness, and Charles Burchfield.
Despite their diminutive size and pristine appearance, the maturation of Milewicz’s paintings is typically slow, sometimes involving a years-long meditation, as in Rocks, Pond, Moon and Fall. With a restrained touch, Milewicz brushes on his subdued yet varied palette in multiple fine layers, yielding luminous, optically complex surfaces. In paintings such as Conjuror or On Hillocks Blue, Milewicz orchestrates softly self-illuminated forms in contrapuntal rhythms, materializing stilled worlds where an intimate and private communion with nature is recollected and shared. As Christina Kee writes of these paintings in the catalog essay, “the viewer’s eye and mind can travel freely through to the silent places, pathways and distances they offer up. Their space is as big as the experience of sight.”
The modesty of Milewicz’s works—in subject, size, palette, and touch—belies their outsized achievement. With little fanfare, he engages multiple traditions, using a forthright pictorial approach that is at once contemporary and timeless, depictive and abstract, factual and metaphysical. The painter opens a gateway, steps aside, and gently allows the viewer to enter into longed-for dreamscapes that, uncannily, seem as familiar as waking life.
Ron Milewicz was born in Brooklyn, New York. He received a BA from Cornell University in 1983 and a master’s degree from Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture in 1986. He attended the New York Studio School from 1990 to 1994, where he later taught drawing and painting. Milewicz has exhibited nationally and internationally, has been reviewed widely, and is represented in numerous private and public collections. Milewicz divides his time between New York City and Gallatin, New York.
The Elizabeth Harris Gallery is located at 529 West 20th Street, 6th floor, and is open Tuesday – Saturday, 12-6.
For further information contact Miles Manning at 212-463-9666 / info@ehgallery.com
