Chuck Connelly
Recent Paintings

March 9 – April 9, 2005

DFN Gallery is pleased to present our first solo exhibition of paintings by Chuck Connelly.  Connelly’s most recent works are centered on the idea of Home.  With intense color and visceral brushwork, Connelly pours out in paint all that he is - including his companions, his dreams, his spiritual vision, and his physical surroundings.  After many years as a downtown Manhattan artist, Connelly moved to the suburbs of Philadelphia, escaping the psychic and physical stresses of the city.  The grounding principle of Home has given Connelly the freedom to express, with deep sensitivity, the essence of his life.

With loose brushwork and mixing of paint directly on the canvas, works like “Iris Before the Storm” overflow the canvas, bursting with luscious green and violet.  In “Studio” and “Paint Table,” Connelly’s thickly rendered brushes, paint tubes, and cans reveal his frenzied interior world literally and metaphorically.  His animals are another subject to which Connelly gravitates, freely distorting color and form, while retaining the image of recognizable pets.  Kittens sit sweetly in flowerbeds, wild-eyed cats cower afraid of their shadows, and Buddy, the cockatiel, perches high up a tree.  These portraits often contain elements of humor and irony.

Counter to these more lighthearted pictures are Connelly’s intense visionary works from imagination.  These paintings are often apocalyptic, and evoke themes of creation out of destruction.  Spirituality and religion are recurrent themes in his work, represented by literal translations of parables, visions of God hovering over the land, or vast cathedrals with interior arches spiraling overhead.  In all of Connelly’s work, the act of painting is as important as the painted image.  The diversity of Connelly’s oeuvre is brought together in “Animal Wallpaper.” In this series of works, Connelly reinforces the two-dimensionality of the painting surface, melding forms and images into the essence of his life.  Dream-like and powerful, these paintings represent everything he sees, feels, hears, and touches.  They are Connelly's subconscious made manifest, at once exuberant and melancholy, hopeful and fearsome.