‘Nearly Distant’ is Dana Saulnier’s sixth solo exhibition at First Street Gallery. Saulnier has exhibited his work in more than thirty solo shows, and numerous group exhibitions.

Saulnier explains that his large scale abstract paintings explore “the figure in landscape, a long-established theme in painting that registers fundamental tensions in experience while resonating with lost spiritual encounters we may imagine in renaissance and baroque art.” 

Peter Malone reviewing an earlier exhibition of Saulnier’s work at the gallery describes similar ideas: “More than any paintings of recent memory, Saulnier’s merge painted illusion and painterly gesture into a compelling vision that embraces 19th-century articulation without definitively describing anything… The ambition Saulnier demonstrates in bridging such a wide cultural synapse is at first startling, though further consideration reveals that the implied chronological markers are not as detached as one might think… His vision is as distinctive and as personal as Goya’s, or Turner’s, or De Kooning’s, for that matter.” 

Lance Esplund, writing for the Wall Street Journal described the sensual power of the work, “Claiming to work through his loss, struggling with devouring and generative forces—a world simultaneously interior and exterior, claustrophobic and overwhelming—Mr. Saulnier grapples with the darkness. As light wanes, tactility is heightened.” The current exhibition, ‘Nearly Distant’ is Saulnier’s sixth solo exhibition at First Street Gallery.

To learn more, visit First Street Gallery’s website.