Ross + Kramer is pleased to announce the opening of Twin Habit, Ross Caliendo’s fourth solo presentation with the gallery. The exhibition will open on Tuesday, December 3, 2024, from 6pm to 8pm at Ross + Kramer Miami Beach.
Ross Caliendo (b. 1988, Pittsburgh, PA) is a Los Angeles-based painter who, through his vibrant, textural paintings, constructs surreal depictions of the natural world that investigate light, energy, and color. Landscape, the primary subject of Caliendo’s work, functions as a conduit for the artist’s exploration and expression of such ideas. Through his synthesis of traditional elements of Surrealism and stylistic elements of Neo-Impressionism, Caliendo crafts natural landscapes that are at once familiar and untraveled. The artist’s unique interpretation and coalescence of techniques used by Neo-Impressionist artists such as Georges Seurat, Camille Pissarro, Henri-Edmond Cross, Paul Signac, and Vincent van Gogh, brings forth scenes of luminous color and depth that reveal carefully composed relationships of color theory.
This new body of work demonstrates an evolution in the artist’s approach to layering and transparency. Caliendo’s work is often characterized by his layering of rich, opaque pigments, and while these techniques are still readily present, they are met with areas of sheer washes of color. Here, Caliendo embraces negative space, using stippling patterns over a blank white background or translucent hues to create a sense of depth without the visual weight, suggesting at times a more fluid and ephemeral quality. When viewed up close, the artist’s large-scale works are charged by intricate, discernible brushstrokes and sgraffito—a technique in which a preliminary layer of paint is covered by an additional layer of a different color and then scraped away to reveal the lower color. Heightened by the artist’s frequent use of contrasting color, the combination of gestural strokes and precise, abbreviated marks create a palpable state of energetic excitement.
Stepping back from the canvas, texture and competing colors swell with light and take on the form of rocks and vegetation. Etched lattice lines, periodically filled in with rich, uniform shades, simulate organic fractal patterns that subtly bring the scene in and out of focus. In her essay on Caliendo’s solo exhibition, Realm, at the CVG Foundation, Beijing, writer and curator Marie Heilich discusses the experience of retreating even further from the work, wherein the “delusive blending of details and optical mixing of fine points snap forests into focus as they’re cast in the psychological veil of their dominant colors schemes...Engulfed in symbolic space, the viewer is no longer a removed observer of paint on canvas, but rather” the work “implicates an embodied viewer, re-casted as a subject bearing witness from within” the scenes that spill from the canvas.
Caliendo earned his BFA at Columbus College of Art and Design (CCAD), Ohio. His work has been exhibited both nationally and internationally at venues such as No Place Gallery (Columbus, Ohio), Fisher Parrish Gallery (New York, NY), Penske Projects (Montecito, CA), Loyal Gallery (Los Angeles, CA), Ross + Kramer Gallery (New York and East Hampton, NY), and Asia Art Center (Taipei, Taiwan). In 2022, the artist held his first institutional solo exhibition in Asia, entitled Realm, at the CVG Foundation, Beijing, China. Twin Habit will be on view December 3, 2024–January 18, 2025, at Ross + Kramer Miami Beach. The gallery is located at 1910 Alton Road, Miami Beach, FL.
