Bianca’s Picks: The Paintings of Eric White
I saw Eric White’s paintings at the Jonathan LeVine Gallery yesterday. Referencing movies set in New York (The French Connection among them), the pieces made me nostalgic for Old Hollywood glamour: bouffant coifs, protracted pontiac hoods, and imperfect film — blurs that assured movies were dreamworlds. That, I think, was my favorite part about White’s paintings: his photographic composition maintained a lot of obscurities impossible to capture on digital film. A blurred realism that melded today’s photographic clarity and yesteryear’s nebulous images, by which we’ve learned our past. Looking at his work, I felt taken by two mediums, and a sort of simultaneous time. I walked all day, one foot in this concrete world, the next in my imagination.
Unfortunately, a lot of White’s larger, and more magnificent work is not in New York, but you can view it here. I still suggest the exhibition though, for I left in high spirits, a contentment not even those nice, little gallerina ladies could spoil when I told them, “Thank you,” and they looked at me like I was a neanderthal.