Maureen Gallace is an American painter who is known for her small-scale works of rural and suburban landscapes, presented through a highly refined and idiosyncratic visual language. These expressive and intimate paintings draw upon environs of the American Northeast, its art-historical traditions in landscape, and the vernacular architecture of modest dwellings.

Her paintings resist direct narratives, and instead embody interpretations of place and artistic process. Through a careful balance of repetition and variation, Gallace has developed a practice where stillness and sustained looking lead to a refined aesthetic vocabulary that concede as much as they resist. Where they concede things like painting’s traditional status with (nominally) conventional subjects and scenes, they simultaneously resist the idea that we are severed from those traditions or subjects by contemporary elements outside the frame—in a fast moving world— labeled “disruptive,” “artificial,” or “fractured.”

The paintings presented at MASSIMODECARLO Pièce Unique offer windows into seemingly peaceful, luminous seascapes, unencumbered but not untouched by human presence. Or a house and barn next to a road that Gallace has painted before, where the changing of light, color, season, and landscape are reexamined and re-presented.

Expressive and reductive at once, Gallace establishes a charged distance between the viewer and her subjects that invite contemplation of familiarity and safety that a house or a landscape can provide. Or do they provide those things?

The paintings may or may not position the viewer as voyeurs—one’s outward looking to gratify the self—but they do insist on the charms of focused concentration (and creation) where the notion of private and public intimacy merge within a small frame. When taken together, Gallace’s painted works offer something small, and vast.