Greg Drasler: On the Lam
By: Ian R. Solano

The Betty Cuningham Gallery has opened up the season with On the Lam, a show by painter Greg Drasler. The show gravitates around the centralized theme of travel and the nuances of traveling. The artwork consists of travel paraphernalia and iconography including auto interiors, books, tents, trailers, cameras, and various personal objects. Additionally, Greg places an emphasis on spatial relations, which are accentuated throughout his work by incorporating patterns.
Drasler intensifies the viewer’s optical stimulation through his garish color palettes, lustrous surfaces, and vibrant images. The paintings consist of furbished and highly polished surfaces that increase contrast and create an ambiguity of depth. Greg’s technical process including his paint application and quality strengthens his and our exploration of space.
Despite Greg’s high caliber of painting, the most captivating part of this series is exemplified through this oblivion of space. His paintings create an optical push and pull between the foreground and the background. They seamlessly arrest motion, creating what appears to be a jittery limbo of pulsating images, which find a middle ground in space. The paintings contain all this movement and yet are definitively grounded in traditional artistic traits. The artist seems to commemorate the rich history of painting through his usage of under-paint, perspective, light, and realism. In some cases, his over-indulgence in the imagery detracts slightly from his overall execution of the painting mechanics.
Emotionally, the paintings are much like the visuals, a composite mosaic of feelings including nostalgia, melancholy, harmony, and anxiety. All which seem to amalgamate into one sensibility yet esoteric environment. In general, the imagery helps develop the emotional qualities of the work, although the subtler and less overwhelming paintings were more emotionally inciting. Ultimately, one word sums up the series best, transcendental. The paintings tell a story, one of which we all know, but never have been on.
