Charles Ladson, Summerville
Nüart Gallery presents, Perspectives, a solo exhibition of paintings by artist, Charles Ladson. The exhibition will run June 7th through June 23rd, with an opening reception on Friday, June 7th, from 5:00 - 7:00 pm. Please join us for hors d'oeuvres and live music. An artist talk will directly precede the opening at 4:00 pm (please RSVP to reserve a spot).
In this body of work, Charles Ladson depicts corners of rooms, snippets of yards, and interior vignettes that feel both common and exceptionally compelling.
Charles Ladson is known for his mixed media paintings of lush, atmospheric landscapes and interior scenes filled with thoughtfully rendered textures and mostly-recognizable abstracted shapes. Ladson’s worlds have a tactile abundance, the paintings are populated by wood, grass, fabric, metal, plastic, brick, concrete, and leather. His spaces draw the viewer in with their languid scenes and sensuous surfaces, and then jar the senses at an almost subliminal level with subtle structural shifts that make the eye want to investigate the paintings. Ladson creates confident spaces grounded in solid rules of planes and vanishing points that lull the viewer into the reality of the world — and then he breaks the rules. With slight moves and disruptive elements — a line just off, a bit of soil that could be positive or negative space, a shadow from a light source that doesn’t jive with the reality of the rest of the world — Ladson creates subtle visual paradoxes. With its gently transmogrified figures and obscured objects left up to the viewer’s interpretation, the work is full of questions that tend to open up into a satisfying mixture of epiphanies and imagination.
Ladson received his BFA degree from the School of Visual Arts in New York and his MFA degree from the University of Georgia. His work has been exhibited throughout the Southeast, with museum shows at both the Georgia Museum of Art, in Athens, Georgia, and the Hunter Museum of American Art in Chattanooga, Tennessee. Charles currently works from his studio in Macon, Georgia.