Selected Works

Miles McEnery Gallery is pleased to announce Under Your Skin and Over the Moon an exhibition of new paintings by Douglas Melini, on view 8 May - 21 June at 525 West 22nd Street. Accompanying the exhibition is a fully illustrated publication featuring a text by Dan Cameron.

Douglas Melini has long explored the rhythmic resonances that connect the natural and built worlds. By combining unexpected materials, Melini blurs the boundaries between painterly and naturalistic forms; reclaimed wood hums with synthetic vibrancy, and mushrooms emerge from rigid, mechanistic structures. His newest body of work eschews the geometric abstraction that has long defined his practice, embracing the more traditional painterly approach of oil on canvas—though his technique and subject matter remain anything but conventional. Melini has created a painted surface that is soft and fuzzy, like moss growing on a rock. This allows the viewer to not only see the painting visually, but also to feel the works with their eyes, stimulating multiple sensory organs at once.

In these latest canvases, nondescript biomorphic forms take root, creating a painted field that feels lush, tactile, and thrumming with energy. Forms organically repeat and echo throughout the composition and constituent parts fractally mimic the whole, such that the painting is not a fixed image but becomes a system of organic creation captured in real time. Like the natural world, these works do not appear instantly constructed but rather gradually evolved, as if Melini has wrangled form from the primordial soup. Melini illuminates the physically deterministic forces that shape our lives; in doing so, he not only encourages greater curiosity for the natural world, but helps us find our footing in it. The artist asks us to put human scale aside and consider our natural landscape from another perspective. Each painting is scaled so that the viewer is seeing nature with all its patterns and complexities from a proximity that’s closer to the size of an ant.

As Dan Cameron notes, “Douglas Melini offers a way of perceiving natural form and beauty that enables us to remain attuned to our perceptual shortcuts, while sidestepping some of the hubris underlying any presumption that nature begins and ends at the limits of our own sensorial understanding.”