Michael Barnett Lewis who has trained and practiced as an architect, emerged with paintings in the 80’s with well received East Village and Soho solo exhibitions at the M-13 and Howard Scott Galleries, along with numerous group exhibitions. His work is in corporate and private collections, as well as the MoCA permanent collection. Currently, Lewis's studio is located along the Hudson River in Dobbs Ferry, NY.  His paintings are characterized by built up surfaces, often utilizing collage and/or constructed elements, artisan plaster, encaustic, and troweled, scraped and carved surfaces.

 

Lewis’s recent body of work revolves around a series called “The Islanders”, referencing a time/space somewhat removed from our day to day reality.  In these paintings, set in strangely atmospheric landscapes, we see captured moments of ambiguous hybrid beings, mostly human but not entirely, that represent contradictory and fragmented aspects of experience and the psyche . The small sculpted figures, although somewhat alien, seem to express a positive determination and humble vulnerability -  engaged in their environments and psychologically permeable to them.

 

They stare out from what are apparently isolated, often austere settings that feel aged and resemble a memory trace. In fact, the surfaces of these highly textural / primitive works are incised with scribblings and carvings that are reminiscent of ancient pictographs - of languages and narratives now forgotten, and like melancholic dream images, illicit fleeting, almost intangible recurring sensations.  

 

Meanwhile, these field settings are luminous, archeological, simultaneously in the process of forming and disintegrating, and at times seem to be abstract expressionism, pure texture, surface, color, secretly posing as landscape. The paintings contain paradoxes unresolved and remain suspended in tension.