Artist: Raymie Iadevaia

Halsey McKay presents Yonder, Raymie Iadevaia’s second solo exhibition with the gallery.

Iadevaia’s oil paintings are densely packed with marks built up into sublime atmospheres and imagined spaces. Passages of paint—thick and thin, scraped and scumbled over, rubbed in, stained, and saturated—flutter in and out of focus in optical vibrations. His pictures induce a hallucinatory effect placing us in anxious dusks, under brightly moonlit nights and rising to euphoric dawns populated by feral animals and unseen neighbors.

In his own words: It’s all out there, the world, it’s endings and beginnings. The paintings are a journey through a gulf of cloudy and crystalline impressions. The paintings are worked like a stone you carry in your pocket, rubbed compulsively between index finger and thumb until smooth. Feeling out the journey before seeing it. Earthing. A cast spell clanks against forgotten keys as you walk further down the trail.
The paintings collect visions. Burning suns blanket the bladed edges of plants. Wild chaparral weaves into thick foregrounds. Long shadows dance like the tails of strange creatures beyond sight. Towering staircases aspire to the cosmic rocks in the sky. Ancient bridges connect the winds of a climate changing. Animals emerge from the middleground. They roam, make nests, look for things to keep them alive. Palm trees are a chorus, junipers shimmer, the cedar grove, solitude. Meanwhile, moons shatter the night, a dust starts to settle, as the wind picks up again.

The paintings begin with a field of diffused color. Like closed eyes staring at the sun. The ambiguity of drifting toward sleep or waking from a dream. Lucid imagery comes forward from toned ground. The pupil morphs, from large pools of dark water to the sharp point of a pine needle. The paintings are layered, infusing the ingredients, like a dimmer switch slowly turning toward illumination. Thickets of brushy knitted streaks and dense patches of variegated paint suffuse the surfaces. Like stuffing suitcases for the long journey ahead.

Far away, the distant cities imperceptible, save for the faint glow of electric light. Like stars, do they still exist, or is it only the ghost of ascending shapes, expired light from long ago? Are these paintings, too, vaporous trances of pigment?

– Raymie Iadevaia, Los Angeles, March, 2022

Raymie Iadevaia (b. 1984, Newport Beach, CA) is an artist based in Los Angeles, CA. He received a BFA from the California College of Arts and Crafts and an MFA from Art Center College of Design. Recent group exhibitions include, 10 Years at Halsey McKay Gallery, East Hampton; Run with the Wolves at The Pit, Los Angeles; and Office Group Show at Bozomag, Los Angeles.