NADA New York 2022

Formed from pared-down materials such as construction adhesive and gesso, Lauriston Avery’s works rely on the subtlety of white, muted hues, texture, light and shadow to express ghostly visages that are at once matter of fact and ethereal. Tightly compressed passages interwoven with structural and rhythmic line interplay over scarred psychic fields where super-sensory, celestial-like figures manifest in material substance and recede into abstraction. For Avery, this practice can be interpreted as conjuring. With an abandon that always seems to court calamity, alternating between feverishly building and impulsively excavating, Avery champions intuition as an interface with the metaphysical. His obsessive process and transmutation of material on the picture plane summons that which exists behind the veil. Here, shimmering between the fantastical and the objective, Avery draws upon his attraction to the mystical and esoteric, where the laws and systems governing what is visible are influenced by what is not.