Masters of Paint: Augusta, Georgia

Pontone Gallery presents a special exhibition in Augusta, Georgia. This is an exhibition of five painters, who explore and exploit process. Common to all is an obsessive interest in the materiality of paint and the technique of painting. Each presents the viewer with a rich and seductive surface. Each articulates their particular vision.

Italian Matteo Massagrande's world is one of mysterious vistas and abandoned interiors, filled with light and atmosphere. The paintings are like stage sets, carefully organised to achieve dramatic tension. His masterful handling of his medium articulates a romantic sense of yearning for things lost, cryptic and just out of reach.

Scottish figurative artist, Iain Faulkner's paintings are essentially self-portraits, where, unusually, the subject is fugitive and mysterious. He remains concealed in plain sight, his back to us or turned away, an archetypal male figure, thoughtful and absorbed. Faulkner's skilful demonstration of technical ability makes for a compelling expression of this enigmatic milieu.

American J Louis paints cropped and fragmentary images of women, which are integrated into a formal schema of veils, skins and blocks of subtle colour. His subjects exist in an abstract world, apart from a specific, pictorial context. There is a constant interplay between the rendering of realistic form and the dynamic, graphic structure of the composition.

Chris Rivers is a British painter of sumptuously-coloured, turbulent skyscapes. The expressively handled paint describes seething clouds, mists and vapours. On closer inspection, tiny figures can be seen caught up in the maelstrom. Our perception of the paintings oscillates between witnessing the sublime vastness of nature and small-scale incidents of human activity.

American, Malcolm Liepke is, above all, a painter of the body, who works with a cast of distinctively-attractive models to make images of languorous and sensual appeal. His pictures are jewel-like in their use of glowing and sophisticated colour. He handles oil paint with risky assurance: it goes on thick and creamy, dashingly applied to describe contour, outline and silhouette.

Junior League of Augusta in the Surrey Center

375 Highland Avenue

Augusta, Georgia 30909