MARIA CALANDRA

Time Is No Fairytale

Opening Sunday, June 1st, 4-6 PM

June 1st - June 27th, 2025

While rendered more expressionistically, Maria Calandra’s paintings feel alive in the tradition of the Hudson River School. They are American without being patriotic. Hiking expeditions in Maine and Northern California, annual pilgrimages to Ghost Ranch and the Rio Grande Valley are essential to her practice. Everything is romantic, how Thomas Cole was drawn to elements of Romanticism and the sublime. They are improvisational, but laced with a perfume of the talismanic. Where some artists rely on gesso to prepare their surface, Calandra will lay out rocks, shells, trinkets and other ephemera collected from her field trips atop the canvas the night before she paints in preparation, literal placeholders. 

She shares a sentiment with Francesco Clemente, even if Maria herself is unaware of the overlap. They are both describers - not prescribers - recording the vibrations of the earth and its inhabitants be they of xylem or blood. “I imagine my veins as roots or water ripples,” explains the artist. “ Elation. I use this as a conduit for making my paintings.” The strength of her depiction lies in sensation, the rhythm of a stream, the flow of a paintbrush. And by removing herself from herself - almost by means of conscious dissociation - Calandra finds her feet and her vision in the soil below.