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Eli Ridgway Gallery

May 8 - June 13, 2010

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172 Minna Street San Francisco, CA 94105
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Wonder Box Challenger, 2010, Acrylic ink on paper 37 x 59 inches
Opening Reception: Saturday, May 8, 4-7pm Baer Ridgway Exhibitions is pleased to present a solo exhibition of new paintings by Matthew Palladino. Palladino's work consists of the graphic, yet imaginative rendering of images of problematic and controversial social issues like gang violence, racial stereotyping, socio-sexual deviance or even mass cult suicide. Through the distillation and aestheticizing of these images, he removes the context from these issues, and through this removal clarifies them. Confronting these issues head on, simply and without affect or contrivance strips them of their deep cultural stigmas and forces the viewer to reinvent their notions of what these issues are. The pieces lack any clear political motivation, causing the viewer to recontextualize the images' ideological content through the unique lens of their own experience with the images. Eviscerating their political content and beautifying the images themselves with a sharp and crisp graphic style, Palladino attempts to alternately remove and reveal their meaning. It's ultimately his desire to explore the world and reveal its deeper meanings by straddling the line between hidden and exposed, and through this open up our mode of seeing. Palladino believes in the power of painting to show us more deeply what it is we see, and what it is to see.