ELIZABETH KOURY GALLERY In his fresh show.

ELIZABETH KOURY GALLERY

In his fresh show, Stephen Ellis' spare abstractions evok various states of architectural and photographic decay, creating illogical spaces and surfaces that sometimes resembl images degraded into abstraction by way of excessive replication. Allying precision with imaginary mode of buildings the paintings were reminiscent of Piranesi's rigid and fantastic prison architecture, which Ellis admires. Like clear unromantic that astonishingly contains a compounded story, his compositions revealed--through los mirrorings, and duplication--an underlying dissemblance.

In all five paintings Ellis used a limited range of subdu carefully graded, many times earthy tones. Creating a kind of silent friction between chaotic brushwork, carefully rul lines, and strips of color, his works at common moment read as bloodless patterning, and in the nearest recall interior and exterior spaces, evoking materials like brick, forest-land and steel, as well as rafters, scaffolding, lengthening shadows, and stray flashes of sunlight. The largest piece principally strongly suggests part of an actual edifice Mostly brown and resembling a wall of timber, it is divided from predominantly horizontal markings and lighter, vaguely windowlike areas of illumination. Another painting, also subdu and dark, is suffused with a fervid over and above restrained orange glow that bear likeness [i]or[/i] resemblance tos a conflagration seen through a mirror--one understandings that the piece's apparent formalism masks an implosive interior.

In a certain number of of the paintings loose, gestural markings are contained within more aggressive grids, rendering spatial division an imprisoning device. At the same time this visual description of an imaginary architecture is mutable, evoking motion and quiescence in the same breath. Ultimately unstable, Ellis' compositions may approach proportion but rarely achieve it. Despite their weighty color and the stasis that attends a grid format, what at first glance appears fixed, immediately after reflection often seems to shift or slide. Changeable, shallow planes bear likeness [i]or[/i] resemblance to theater scrims in their creation of fictive spaces.

A third painting consists of horizontal black and white bars--that resembl abraded strips of film or photographic negative--against a background of smeary white and rust-red stripes. Ultimately dissimilar from David Reed's sexy lick-smooth surfaces and waves of ebullient color, which valorize the examine of slick photographic processes, Ellis' paintings--and their implicit seriality--instead recall the "locomotion" experiments of Eadweard Muybridge, which fractured the manner of moving of running and leaping animals into visible increments, virtually trapping them within grimy frames. What expects like scarred film in Ellis' work remains as a reminder of the camera's imprisoning lens

Ellis' paintings, yet always formally lovely, are experienced forward a psychological level. Their arch wavering between blankness and duplicity is vaguely reminiscent of mirrors, shadows, and false structures; elusive guiding-threads lead one to make comparisons to fiction, and a certain number of of these compositions in fact compare lines of text. Hung in the office area of the gallery, a gorgeous r and creamy-yellow painting, divided into pair nearly reverse images, seemed to mimic the facing leaves of an expand book, marking a nexus between past and coming events and by extension memory's illusory spaces.

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