Christine Lafuente: ...The painter must look at the chaotic, muddy foreground below a transcendent sky, must look at the shadowy wall behind a lit bouquet of flowers. As soon as the focus shifts, it is tempting to make the painting all about the muddy ground or all about the dirty wall. Painting from nature is an opportunity to see poetically in a way that a camera cannot. Painting takes time. And in that space of time nothing is still. When I decide on a composition, it is usually in the middle of the process rather than the beginning. In a way, the later the better and before the brush touches the canvas. I spend time looking, mixing, I might do a drawing, I’m adjusting tones, I’m gathering materials, but mostly I am being with the thing I see for a long exposure and allowing it to reveal a composition.

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Gross McCleaf Gallery is delighted to present In Visibility, a solo exhibition of new paintings by Christine Lafuente. Known for her nuanced handling of oil color relationships and layered, reflective surfaces, Lafuente brings together still lifes, seascapes, and cityscapes in a body of work that explores how we see and remember.

The experience of looking is dynamic, with memory filling in gaps and fleeting details taking on a life of their own in the mind’s eye. Lafuente translates the fluidity of these perceptual conditions into paint, transcribing light and atmosphere through color to produce compositions that resolve these shifting conditions into their own visual truth.

It is a “harmonic resonance between light and color,” that determines each composition, as Lafuente describes. Her paintings are built through closely tuned color relationships, where variations of tone and saturation carry structure in place of fixed form...

“I am drawn to subjects that I don’t fully understand visually, that are mysterious, elusive, and at times almost impossible to see clearly.”

-Christine Lafuente

In Subtones in Springtime, Christine Lafuente explores the parallels between color and musical form in her newest series of paintings. The overlapping terminology between art and music helps to illuminate comparisons between the two fields. Lafuente says, “I begin to transpose visual experience into an imaginary painting experience… like a musician who reads music with the playing of a specific instrument in mind, this kind of looking is experienced in the language of oil color, brushwork, and flatness.” Likewise, Lafuente focuses on the relevance of subtones, which she likens to subconscious presence, or emotional states that can be captured and embedded within her works. 

Gross McCleaf Gallery is pleased to announce two solo exhibitions of new paintings by gallery artists, Christine Lafuente and Joseph Lozano and a group exhibition featuring the work of Melanie Fischer, Kati Gegenheimer, Eileen Goodman, Elizabeth Hamilton, Ying Li, Jonathan Mandell, Irene Mamiye, Lynn Muchnick, Scott Noel, Barbara Sosson, and Frank Trefny.

Christine Lafuente is a graduate of Bryn Mawr College and received her Certificate in Painting from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. After spending years in Philadelphia where she was artist-in-residence at the Fleisher Art Memorial, Lafuente moved to Brooklyn and completed her MFA at Brooklyn College in 2004.  She has exhibited her work throughout the Mid-Atlantic region in numerous solo shows and had a solo exhibition in London, England in 2008.  Lafuente has been represented by the Gross McCleaf Gallery since 2002. . .

When Christine Lafuente set out to paint her latest series of works in Puerto Rico in March 2020, she never fathomed what would transpire over the next few months. The trip was planned a year prior after having visited the country for a workshop and finding that the cities reminded her of her late father’s home country of Cuba, which he left to go to university in the United States and was unable to return.

Lafuente had planned to explore San Juan, learning more about the people, the architecture and the culture, in hopes of making a deeper connection to a similar ancestry as her own. Soon after she arrived for what was supposed to be a shorter trip, Lafuente was locked down in the country and stayed for several months because of the pandemic. Her work, which she had hoped would reflect the vibrancy and beauty of the city at a more intimate level, shifted to views from the windows of the terrace apartment she rented. The work created was more internal but still filled with the bold architecture and bright sunlight.