“My pictures are the result of study and labor with the attachment of medium. The paintings are the curious example of an attempt at sincerity, a rendered quality describing a condition. While these sources may be awkward, with time the pictures may be seen as varying levels of a realization. In the search of the present, many emotions will result within the picture. And although the process to capture the feeling is inadequate, the attempt remains.”
- Benjamin Passione
Turtles All The Way Down, 40" x 50", Oil On Canvas
Benjamin Passione was born in Willingboro, NJ in 1987. In his youth, he was influenced by artists Wassily Kandinsky and Paul Klee. Passione attended life drawing classes at the Moore College of Art and then later completed the certificate program at Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. There, he studied painting under artist Bill Scott and Sidney Goodman. Passione is also a recipient of the Lewis S. Ware Travel Scholarship.
Passione's art generally presents as abstract non-representational oil paintings focused on color and composition. However, he does works on paper which includes mixed media. Passione's paintings are very reactionary and he paints slowly, usually over years, responding to each painting, allowing them to dictate what they will become.
Passione lives and works in Philadelphia with his wife and fellow artist, Mickayel Thurin. His current influences are James Castle, Joan Mitchell and Pierre Bonnard.
As The Birds Fly, 30" x 48", Oil On Canvas
Dancing Underwater, 40" x 40", Oil On Canvas
Passione's paintings breathe color. They are symphonies in spatial complexity and color harmony. The frenzy of the artist's marks connect through an underlying order building complex rhythms like the confluence of currents from flowing waters. Be it with paper, pigment, or thread, Passione's works materialize from an abundance of momentary decisions and find an unexpected wholeness through accumulating sympathetic moments.
Gross McCleaf Gallery is pleased to share a new body of abstract oil paintings by Benjamin Passione in No Time To Be Shy. These vibrant paintings mark Passione's continued exploration of atmospheric color fields, layered with his linear, script-like markings. These new works are larger, lighter and brighter than before and feature the emergence of spherical shapes drawn in Passione’s signature style. Passione’s poetic titles continue to offer inspiration and invite the viewer to search the scene for possible hidden imagery and underlying narratives.
“I think everything is in there: events, people I know, stories, architecture, music…I’m a big believer in coincidence, synchronicity, and numerology: it’s all about how things get funneled and filtered into a linear, transcendent expression.”
-Thomas Paul Raggio
Gross McCleaf is pleased to exhibit a new body of hard-edged abstractions by Thomas Paul Raggio in his first solo show with the gallery. This exhibition, titled In the Valley, features Raggio’s signature combination of carefully organized lines and stripes, meticulously painted in acrylic. While non-objective, the painted bars create harmonious color vibrations that ripple across each canvas. Crisscrossing diagonals offer geometry, movement, and balance...
