Gianna Commito: Tolerances

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Gianna Commito

Tolerances 

March 21, 2025 - April 9, 2025

Opening Reception: Friday, March 21, 6 - 8pm

Rachel Uffner Gallery is pleased to present Tolerances, Gianna Commito’s fourth solo exhibition at the gallery. In the controlled tumble of Gianna Commito’s abstract geometric paintings, space bends and twists disorientingly. Certain striped planes behave like solids, but then abandon physics altogether. Elsewhere, a pattern your brain has classified as background suddenly disobeys logic and pops to the front. Flatness and dimensionality jockey against each other amiably.

Stripes, thick and thin, do much of the work here. And they are a working pattern: they warn, they call for notice, they signal fun times ahead. At the center of this hubbub, Commito is the conductor. The rewarding effort it takes to puzzle out (yet never reconcile) curve and line, corner and window, is the same work she has put into creating this space, tenfold. 

In person, you get to register the grit of casein paint over marble dust and clay grounds. You can see the traces of taped-off layers lurking beneath the current façade. Like an iceberg, each painting provides as much information as Commito has concealed. These pieces have been labored over, built into being, without any of the sterile tidiness that comes from a preconceived plan. 

While the works in Tolerances conjure all sorts of familiar imagery (Duomo-like architecture, theater scrims, ’80s wallpaper and tangled extension cords), they are emphatically objects — super low-relief, painted objects — not representations of other things. Picture them as artifacts, excised from a wall dreamed up by Giovanni Battista Piranesi.

Commito’s crisp edges, luxuriant colors and tight moments of brushy expressionism offer sensory delights that screens can only hint at. And let’s not forget scale: Tolerances contains her largest paintings to date.

Bigger panels breed new challenges. How much can an image handle when it’s as tall as the artist herself? It’s a question that brings us to the show’s title. Plural, the word hints at its multiple meanings. In engineering, “tolerance” describes an acceptable amount of “wrongness” that can still yield a successful whole.