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The Landing is pleased to announce Still Light, a solo exhibition of new acrylic on panel paintings by Henry Glavin. This exhibition marks the artist’s first solo exhibition in Los Angeles and will be on view from September 14th to October 26th, 2024. In Still Light, Glavin explores the architecture and landscape of the Northeast by bathing seemingly comforting and familiar spaces with a stark light that subverts nostalgia, rendering them vacant and uncanny. 

Glavin’s paintings draw from locations across upstate New York, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Brooklyn, and Manhattan, yet they all seem to emerge from a shared American landscape. Sourceless shadows, blunt highlights, repeating forms, and meticulously detail characterize his visual language. The human figure is conspicuously absent, even in works that reveal the interiors of homes through windows, conjuring a pervasive silence that echoes throughout the exhibition.

His approach exaggerates romantic tropes, like golden hour skies and dappled light, while introducing unsettling flatness, unreliable light sources, and skewed perspectives. Viewers may initially feel a sense of comfort in the content of his imagery, but a nagging sense of what is absent or askew emerges with sustained looking.The paintings are not translations of the actual space, but stitched together facades of them that are distanced  by screens and memory. The result is a constructed image that has a double valence– ranging from comforting to unsettling.

 The influence of contemporary photography, particularly iPhone photography, is evident in the formats and perspectives of Glavin’s work. Still Light pushes his work further into the cinematic realm, blending traditional landscape painting with modern photography to create scenes that feel both staged and spontaneous. Similarly, Glavin’s painting technique is a balance between precision and intuition. He begins by mathematically scaling photographic references onto his panels, building a grid using graphite and a T-Square, he  constructs an initial blueprint-like composition. However, he quickly abandons these rigid guides in favor of memory and imagination, transforming familiar places into haunting, dreamlike visions that exist somewhere between reality and recollection.

While painting, Glavin applies matte acrylic, mixed without a medium, that results insurfaces that invite a tactile engagement distant from oil painting. He describes the effect as a sort of “itchiness”; one that adds a physical dimension to the sensory experience of his work. The nagging absences of Glavin’s compositions articulate with his itchy painterly qualities to create an overall otherworldliness that permeates his paintings of subjects otherwise near and known to us.