The Fine Arts Center opened its doors to a new gallery featuring surreal landscapes from Leigh Tarentino. PHOTO CREDIT: Hannah Charron
On Sept. 14, the University of Rhode Island’s Main Gallery in the Fine Arts Center reopened to display the surreal landscape paintings of local artist Leigh Tarentino titled “Shade Garden: New Paintings.”
URI’s new gallery director Rebecca Levitan expressed excitement about the gallery opening its doors to the public once more.
“We’re just really excited to have more physical exhibitions,” Levitan said. “COVID has not been great for experiencing live art.”
This particular experience was arranged by former galley director Ben Anderson and the painter herself. Tarentino is a professor of the visual arts at Brown University and her work focuses mainly on landscapes, but not in the traditional manner commonly associated with the genre. Tarentino’s paintings play with the expectations of space, texture and color to create otherworldly images on the canvas.
In the description of the exhibit, which collects a number of Tarentino’s paintings created over the past three years, the artist describes the places seen in the images as a “reconfiguring of the built landscape.” The locations are based upon memory or even imagination rather than being a fastidious recreation of a real place.
Tarentino said that the historical definition of the sublime — a philosophical ideal regarding the emotions evoked by art — is important, and yet also ambivalent, in regards to her work. She writes in the exhibit’s description that the pieces are meant to evoke the pleasure and freedom of a quick sketchbook drawing, and capture the feeling of this fleeting visual perception that may bend the rules in its brevity.
“It’s exciting to me as a painter as well,” Levitan said. “[Tarentino] is very much a painter’s painter. A lot of her work centers on the surfaces and the traditions of painting, especially in regards to landscape painting.”
To create these “gardens,” Tarentino utilized oil paint on linen canvas. Being able to see the paintings in their physical form certainly makes a difference, as the layering of the paint on the canvas adds to the unique visual representation of their natural scenes. Many of the paintings show clear landscapes, such as the rolling hills of “Alikeness” or the rising stone spires of “The Festival of the Archers.” However, others are far more ambiguous in what exactly they are representing, such as the sunny shapes of “After” and the sanguine hues of “Mica.” These paintings evoke a sensation of the uncanny valley in the viewer, where the mind can almost recognize a landscape but cannot quite pin down what it is looking at. The sensation is much like waking up from a dream you know you had, but just can’t quite remember.
Tarentino’s paintings will be on display in URI’s Main Gallery at the Fine Arts Center until Oct. 14, where they can be viewed Monday through Thursday from 12-4 p.m. The art department encourages students of all disciplines to come and engage with the exhibitions.
“The gallery is definitely mostly something that the art students tend to know about,” Levitan said. “It’d be exciting to see other departments and others get involved.”