“Scenic Route” Presents New Work by Michael Berryhill
The act of painting contains multitudes. It can be complicated, easy, devastating, relentless, monotonous, exhilarating, sometimes all at the same time. It is often challenging to capture the process of painting, and the physical and conceptual layering that a surface might contain. The work of Michael Berryhill is unpacking this complex and often unseen process in his current exhibition, “Scenic Route,” open through October 28 at Night Gallery in Los Angeles.
Michael Berryhill, “Unbound,” 2023, oil on linen, 90 x 74 inches; courtesy of the artist and Night Gallery.
The Show Features Energetic, Exhilarating Visuals
The show presents a series of interconnected oil paintings in the artist’s signature style. Varying in size, each work comprises vibrantly colored shapes and familiar motifs, like fruits, animals, and architectural forms, that are carefully inscribed, or perhaps excavated, on or from the surfaces used. Birds, bananas, oranges, humanoid figures, and abstracted fleur de lis emblems recur throughout these energetic scenes and create a sense of cohesion throughout the show. Though each work has the depth and dynamism to stand on its own, the journey of walking through the exhibition and happening upon each work one after the next allows the viewer to really read each work more fully.
These aren’t nascent objects. A quick examination of each canvas will make clear how each individual work has lived a long and energetic life, as portrayed through the dense, chunky layers of paint that rest atop one another, forming cross-layer narratives. It’s exhilarating to think about the lives, figures, and actions that might be happening just underneath the top layer of paint.
Installation view of Michael Berryhill’s “Scenic Route,” courtesy of the artist and Night Gallery.
It’s become somewhat of a rebellious act to paint small. The art world continues to grow, and apparently, so do the scales that artists are told to work. Here, Berryhill beautifully presents large-scale paintings alongside more intimately sized works, creating a varied experience of walking through the show. These additions add an exciting component to the overall presentation, requiring viewers to zigzag closer and further away from each work to get a fuller sense of each work, but also the exhibition as a whole, adding another element of exploration to the experience of navigating through the artist’s creation.
Michael Berryhill’s Use of Color Emulates Modern Masters
With a sensitivity to color and form that parallels the work of Matisse or Bonnard, Berryhill’s paintings present scenes and forms that are at once accessible and discernable, while also appearing curious and undefinable. There is a lightheartedness, too, both from the bright palette, but also the subjects and the titles of each work. But there is also grave seriousness and awareness of the world around him. Even without the physical representations of anything discernibly or overtly political, these works are squarely focused on the now. A momentary vignette of calmness, fun, and light amidst an ocean of uncertainty and pain.
Berryhill’s intuitive navigation of form and composition through layering and time highlights his spontaneity, experimentation, and inquisitive nature as an artist, who is exploring and painting at the same time, without a discernible roadmap. It is a refreshing reprieve from a world saturated with images that are overly constructed, politically-charged; this show offers an opportunity to enjoy paintings and the process of making them. In “Scenic Route,” the artist takes the viewer on a journey without a specific destination, inviting a myriad of interpretations as to what we might find at the end of the trip.
Michael Berryhill, “Palais Romantique,” 2023, oil on canvas, 76 x 96 1/4 inches; courtesy of the artist and Night Gallery.
Michael Berryhill, “Messenger,” 2023, oil on linen, 62 1/4 x 48 1/4 inches; courtesy of the artist and Night Gallery.
