Still life is a time-worn but hardly vigorous genre at the moment, but Athens, Georgia-based painter Holly Coulis has been inventively tweaking its terms, and never more so than in these new playful and precise works. Eleven oils on creamy white linen on 1 1/2 inch deep stretchers fill the two main rooms of the gallery, with five small gouaches on paper in a connecting hallway. They deny established settings for the objects and foodstuffs that populate her painted worlds: horizons have been elided and often the pleasant challenge is to work out the dynamic of the table, which has become less and less at odds with the flat verticality of the canvases.

Like Cézanne, Coulis sees forms from a mobile perspective: the painter in front of the object becomes as ambulatory as the viewer can be in front of the painting. The result is a charged kind of reality, away from the fixity of the Euclidean tradition of Heda and Chardin and Manet. These “Table Studies” bear a flattening out of forms, an alternation between planarity and fullness so essential in Cézanne, Cubism, and Matisse. And Coulis adopts the Cubist gambit of working with mundane material: there are no skulls, stingrays, oysters, crystal goblets—the stock-in-trade of the Dutch Baroque. Her repertory company of forms includes common fruits, bowls, glasses, and dishes. Read More