C. Grimaldis Gallery is pleased to present Traces, a group exhibition featuring contemporary photography, drawing, and painting.

Splitting his time between New York and Italy, Frank Dituri’s imagery is often sourced from Umbria. His close attention to both the natural and man made worlds are reflected within rich, enveloping shadows — reminiscent of charcoal drawings, his photographs give way to deeply personal and poetic portrayals of landscape. Similarly focused on the relationship between humans and nature, Mauro Manetti works in a variety of mediums to explore this connection and the concept of identity. Having grown up in Tuscany surrounded by imagery of the Renaissance, his work holds a strong bond to the classical with reference to symbols of the time seen in the work itself. Michael Morris’ vibrant photographs render internal worlds through the external by way of intuitively crafted moments of abstraction. Portions of foliage, peeling paint, and rusted metal form compositions that act as windows into Morris’ perspective, allowing us to consider what is seen and what is hidden.

Andreas Rentsch and Claire Seidl utilize both photographic and painting techniques in their practices. While Seidl’s black and white photographs are deeply rooted in a representational sense of place, her paintings on mylar are pure abstraction, though both bodies of work remain grounded in a sense of mystery that gently unfolds with time. Andreas Rentsch challenges traditional notions of photography in his experimental approach to the medium, using chemistry on X-Ray film to channel influence from performance art, drawing and painting. His experience growing up on a prison compound in Switzerland where his father was the warden remains a fundamental aspect to his art practice.

Drawing from various photographic and mark-making techniques to create viscerally textural imagery, this collection of artists brought together by Fran Kaufman creates a visual language that expands our way of seeing into a realm of mystery and intangibility within light, shadow and texture. As written by Kaufman, the exhibition catalogue states, “Traces, defined as a mark, object, or other indication of the existence or passing of something, connects to both the process and outcome of each of the five artists. The mutability of memory, ‘ghost images’, the passage of time, erasures and the transposition of imagery all challenge the viewer to delve deep, finding our own interpretation within these [works]...In their own ways, each searches for something essential, for an essence, a way to transfer the beauty and simplicity of the everyday into something more enigmatic and provocative. As Marcel Proust said ‘The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.”