Exhibition Dates: March 5 – April 23, 2016
Opening Reception: Saturday, March 5 from 6–8 pm
Gallery Location: 432 Julia Street, New Orleans, LA 70130
Hours: Tuesday–Saturday, 10 am–5 pm
Contact Info: 504.522.1999; arthurrogergallery.com

The Arthur Roger Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition by Wayne Gonzales. The exhibition will be on view at Arthur Roger Gallery, located at 432 Julia Street, from March 5 – April 23, 2016. The gallery will host an opening reception with the artist in attendance on Saturday, March 5 from 6-8 pm.

Wayne Gonzales is a self-described analytic painter. His work addresses the pliancy of photography and its relationship to history and memory. He culls source images online and from his personal collection, and dissects them to understand the various physical and emotional layers within before reassembling their valued parts on canvas. Steel Stillman in Art In America describes, “He cracks open images we think we already know and injects them with subversive sensuality and doubt.”

Gonzales works with a very limited palette, often only a few values of a single color. The result is a stratified composition that may be recognizable only from a distance – an experience akin to watching a crowd from a distance versus being a participant in the action.

At the invitation of Jim Richard, Gonzales presents Forest, a large-scale painting on canvas. Drawing inspiration from Gauguin, the artist imposes a rational system on his landscape. Each of the trees in the painting contains six values of grey that are all mixed chromatically, juxtaposing warm and cool colors mixed with different greys. In terms of the space, the range of the values shortens and the picture gets lighter as you go deeper into the space.

Wayne Gonzales was born in 1957 in New Orleans. In 1985, he received a B.A. from the University of New Orleans. After a year of graduate school in fine art, he moved to New York in the late 1980s. He has exhibited nationally and internationally and his works are included in many prominent collections including the Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas; the Guggenheim Museum, New York; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; and the Microsoft Art Collection. He lives and works in New York.