opening expo: Alana Richards
Alana Richards presents a new series of figurative portraits. Rather than bestowing a statement or concept, she creates emotional value in her paintings. Using slow-drying oil paint in a traditional manner building up layers, she gives the portrayed a contemporary charisma of mixed messages to the viewer. Deriving from her own archive of analog photographs, she captures the pure gaze of her sitters and adds her own signature of the unknown, the corrupt, the fearless – of a shadowy, nocturnal world. The question of what is real and what is not, gives the portraits an androgynous and ambiguous expression. This, in combination with no background detail, gives classical portraiture the naive freshness it deserves.
