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James Bertucci
August 26- September 24, 2022
Opening reception Friday, August 26th 6-9pm.
Bob’s Gallery is pleased to announce recent oil paintings by James Bertucci. Bertucci’s paintings depict scenes of urban planning and construction developments in and around the city’s boroughs.
In New York City, every new construction is marked by an eight foot barrier wall obstructing access from the public sidewalk to the private project site. These barricades are made out of plywood or in some circumstances chain link fencing. The walls are painted “hunter green” with a minimum of one viewing panel (12 inch by 12 inch opening) for every 25 feet of frontage.
The viewing panel creates a portal into this otherwise in-accessible and feral landscape, where vegetation freely grows until its eventual destruction and removal. On the public sidewalk of these construction sites, trees are deemed protected and required to be bordered off. Scaffolding, or a timber framing is assembled in and around the footprint of the tree and then further masked off with layer(s) of polyethylene orange fencing. The construction barriers mark a complicated tension between inside and outside, interior and exterior, wild and contained. At the same time, the barricades signify gentrification and widening socio-economic inequalities within the American city.
The paintings are composites, sourced from the artist's archive of images and color memory. Most of the paintings take months and years to complete, with the paint building up through extensive layering. Often, a complex foundation of underpainting is created for the final application of paint, mirroring the process of constructing a building. The resulting surfaces are an index of the painting process and examine what it means to construct an image.
James Bertucci (b. 1989, Chicago, Illinois) currently lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. Bertucci graduated with a BFA from Laguna College of Art & Design in 2012 and completed an artist residency at Vermont Studio Center in 2015. Bertucci was a selected artist in the 2016 Southern California/Baja Biennial and has had solo exhibitions at Basement Projects (now The Painter’s Room) and B- Studios in Santa Ana, CA.