Louis Risoli: Flat Earth
Peter Scott and Paul Stopforth: Common Grounds

February 6 — 28 at Gallery NAGA

In February Gallery NAGA will present work by three veteran Boston artists who respond to our vast and small world.  Louis Risoli, whose work resembles both enormous and tiny entities and who is known for his inventively shaped canvases, presents, for the first time, a series of paintings uniform in format. Peter Scott and Paul Stopforth, exhibiting side-by-side, share a fascination with familiar terrain, corners of the world that are personal for them.

Louis Risoli: Flat Earth and Peter Scott and Paul Stopforth: Common Grounds both run from February 6 through 28.  A reception for the artists and public will be held at the gallery on Friday, February 6 from 6 to 8 pm.

Louis Risoli’s large shaped canvases usually splay flamboyantly across the walls.  The current body of work uses a consistent hourglass shape, a tall rectangle whose waist is cinched in.  “I wanted to create a series where the space between paintings became an important aspect,” Risoli explains.  “I wanted to build emotion through color and form rather than through gesture.”

Risoli’s work often conjures up solar systems or microscopic worlds.  Being between these two domains is central to Risoli’s work.  “I love the idea of the interplay between the cellular and the planetary, the macro and the micro.”

Peter Scott and Paul Stopforth are teaching colleagues at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and have long respected each other’s work.  Scott translates onto paper, with his signature quirky drawing line, images of his surrounding and his travels from photographs he has taken over the past thirty years.  Storefronts, the back of a pickup truck as it recedes into a ominous landscape, a statue in the interior of the Metropolitan Museum of Art are all transformed into seriocomic set pieces by Scott’s imagination and hand.  Asked why such quiet, unpopulated views interest him, Scott explains that he “enjoys looking at images that are not overly nostalgic.”

Stopforth’s work also resides within his experience.  A native of South Africa, his current work deals with the tensions and transitions surrounding apartheid as expressed through the present appearance of objects and spaces on Robben Island, site of the notorious prison which held, among many others, Nelson Mandela, and which Stopforth visited in 2004.  Objects once so laden with one meaning now have a second life in the wake of their horrible history.  Asked to describe what is common in his and Scott’s work, Stopforth paraphrases William Carlos Williams, “No ideas but in things.”