To get where she is, Holly Coulis had to lop off some heads. The faces that populated some of her recent semi-abstract paintings, which merge still life with landscape, are absent in her newest works, now lighting up the walls of Klaus von Nichtssagend Gallery. She has removed volumetric renderings with her graphic contour lines, the ellipses at the tops and bottoms of pitchers, cups, and bowls. They suggested three-dimensional space, which was restrictive. These changes — eliminating portraiture from her paintings and compressing the pictorial plane — have allowed her to be more idiosyncratic, playful, convincing, and even funny.

The evil guardian protecting splayed Pringles in “Cat and Potato Chips” (2017) stares down the viewer in a tour de force of tabletop comedy. The humor, however, belies a sophisticated execution of color and form. The chips’ shapes are reiterated in the cat’s eyes, rendered as analogous objects, thematically connecting them. The flat black mass of feline form fluctuates between negative and positive space, keeping the cat’s proximity to you uncertain. The shift in scale from chip-to-cat-to-table is a satisfying 1-2-3 increase.  As comedians know timing, Coulis knows composition. Read More