How I Love Thee
Structure anchors Isabel Riley’s paintings, amid colors like blossoms and, perhaps most importantly, space. Capricious, playful space, like a child darting around in a game of hide-and-seek. Isabel’s gestures create a sense of motion and instability. Even the structures – something to cling to, guideposts like the lead lines in a stained glass window – sometimes smear and cloud.
Isabel’s exhibition Out of Thin Air in Michele Mercaldo Jewelry’s new, bigger gallery on Waltham Street in Boston’s South End has an apt title, as if – poof! – Each painting captures one dizzy moment in an ever-changing universe, and oh, my, that moment is a universe in itself. The artist’s unabashedly joyful palette – candy pinks, buzzy blues, and the sharp greens of newly budded leaves – suggests that all this action may be uncertain, but it’s not chaos. Really, it’s more like a party, maybe with a séance going on in the back room.
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