Russell Tyler and Matt Mignanelli share certain affinities in their approach to making paintings. The two artists expose a dialogue that passes through an evolving pictorial reality built of elemental geometric forms, where unassuming similarities in structure and planning take place. Between The Lines, not only explores their common visual symmetry; a shared combination of hard-edges stripped to their austere essentials in form and color, but where painterly gestures, variation, change, and chance appear randomly through their process as the work progresses.

Related to and influenced by Hard-Edge, Color Field and Minimalist school painters such as Ellsworth Kelly, Josef Albers, Frank Stella, and John McLaughlin, the highly structured and organized bodies of work from each artist are easily characterized by solid colors or black and white monochromes, clearly defined by interaction and balance. However, upon closer inspection, the artists also share consistencies through their modes of execution, where imperfections such as drips, splotches, and textures are meaningfully applied or randomly allowed to come through on the surface of their work. Further equilibrium appears conceptually and can be read through the delineations of space that evoke a belying response upon the virtual and industrial visuals around us in impasted points of harmony. Graceful, playful, silent, loud, juicy, dry, dreamily edible; a constantly challenging game among surface, texture and light, that when mixed together in perfect elegance bounces between two and three dimensional forms. The platform for an illusionistic space appears and the flatness of the canvas emerges with dancing vibrations.

ABOUT THE ARTISTS:

Matt Mignanelli lives and works in New York City and is a graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design. His paintings have been exhibited extensively throughout the United States and internationally with solo exhibitions at Richard Heller Gallery, Los Angeles, LUCE Gallery, Torino, and Dubner Moderne, Lausanne. His works will be included in The Go-Between II: Selections from the Ernesto Esposito Collection at Palazzo Fruscione, Salerno (forthcoming), and have been exhibited in Linear Abstraction at the SCAD Museum of Art, Savannah (2015), Ameringer, McEnery, and Yohe (2015), Dickinson Roundell (forthcoming 2015), Contemporary Istanbul (forthcoming 2015), EXPO Chicago with Richard Heller Gallery (2014), Regina Rex (2014), Bleecker Street Arts Club, New York (2013), GRAHAM, New York (2013), Guerrero Gallery, San Francisco (2013), Art Copenhagen with Marianne Friis Gallery (2012), Goss-Michael Foundation in Dallas (2012), and Quint Contemporary, San Diego (2012).

Russell Tyler lives in Brooklyn, New York. He received his M.F.A. from Pratt Institute in Brooklyn and his B.F.A. from Concordia University in Montreal. He has had solo exhibitions at DCKT Contemporary in New York City, Freight Volume in New York City, Alon Segev Gallery in Tel Aviv, Gordon Gallery 2 in Tel Aviv, B15 Gallery in Copenhagen, Fouladi Projects in San Francisco, and EbersMoore Gallery in Chicago. He has been included in group exhibitions at the Savannah College of Art and Design, New Britain Museum of American Art, Ana Cristea Gallery, Thierry Goldberg Gallery, ACME (Los Angeles), among others. He has received reviews in Artforum, Hyperallergic, NY Arts Magazine, and Le Monde.