Curators: Jeffrey Scott, Yanni Kyriazis
Opening: Tuesday, 17 November, 6:00 – 8:00 p.m.

Artists Bill Claps and George H. Lewis present two spiritually allied, stylistically diverse, and aesthetically compelling takes on the landscape. Their paintings provide a new perspective from which a 21st Century audience can understand and interpret this genre. Classic landscape art incorporates technologies currently available to the artist to render a
distinct vision of time, place, and human scale in the context of an “unspoiled” world. Claps and Lewis define this axiom explicitly in vibrantly contemporary idiom. Their works defy the conventional formal constraints of the past by incorporating legacy and non-legacy techniques and materials, infusing new life and shape into an ever-changing globalized “landscape”, ever aware of the past, while capturing the present and conjecturing the future. The forest as depicted by Bill Claps is a primeval place of magic, mystery and discovery, animistic in its raw power and transcendence. One is immersed in the place itself, yet retains a distinct understanding that this is a world of Mr. Claps’ creation and interpretation. It is a world of literal duality, a tangible dream world portrayed in positive and negative, a shadowy, modern Forest of Arden. The ghosts of this forest whisper the names Hokusai, Hiroshige, Friedrich, Van Gogh, Monet, and Adams, though this world is devoid of human form and defines itself completely on its own terms. Claps’ masterful canvases capture both the forest and the trees with visceral exuberance and compositional precision.

The evocative nature-scapes of George H. Lewis bring human form into the natural world in ways redolent of classic Song Dynasty landscape, yet from a uniquely modern perspective of East-West nexus. Here we distinctly observe the landscape before us, praise its majestic essence, entering it from the artist’s secret Bacchic seat of worship. Whether the smoky mists of a poetic dusk encircling a mountain in Bhutan, or a lithe dancer in an ecstasy atop a pastoral Silk Road plateau, or even a mysterious landscape from the Catskills, New York State, Lewis does not reproduce nature, he transcends it, consecrates its animus, painting a hymn to Mother Earth and her devotees. The haunting narratives of these paintings connect the continents of this world, while rendering topographical specificity with painterly lyricism.

Mr. Claps studied painting and art history at Harvard College, the Art Student’s League and in Florence, Italy. Mr. Lewis studied in the UK and Italy and has lectured extensively on his art and travels, including at Harvard College and the Kennedy School. Their works are collected internationally, and this is their first joint exhibition. Jeffrey Scott and Yanni Kyriazis (Kirshner Kyriazis Fine Art) are based in Manhattan and deal in the acquisition and disposition of masterworks on the secondary market. Both lecture extensively on art acquisition, history, and portfolio diversification.

Salomon Arts Gallery has presented exceptional contemporary and emerging art in Tribeca for more than two decades. Owners Rodrigo and Gigi Salomon are fixtures in the New York art world with a distinguished international clientele. High Resolution images available upon request.