Janene Gentile "Abstraction" | Art Exhibition At Coldwell Banker Village Green Realty

Coldwell Banker Village Green Realty’s Kingston NY Real Estate office is proud to present the art of Janene Gentile in an exhibition titled Abstraction as part of our "Gallery At Work" series.

Talk Nation Magazine recently called Janene Gentile one of the "most notable Abstract Expressionist American painters to emerge out of New York in this decade."

The Abstract Expressionist artist Janene Gentile was born in New York City and spent her youth in the 70's and 80's in the Bronx.  Early on, her art reflected the era's need for social change and she collaborated in many public projects that sought to improve outcomes for disenfranchised segments of society.  After graduating from Lincoln Center College with a degree in Fine Arts, she went on to earn her Master's from NYU.  She also studied and exhibited her works in Venice, Italy and throughout Europe.  She is a member of Women Sharing Art, and may be seen on Tumblr under Gentile Painter, and at Abstract Gentile on Facebook.  She currently resides in the beautiful Hudson Valley and creates at her studio in Tivoli, New York.  

Action Painting: the term was coined by the American art critic Harold Rosenberg to characterize the work of a group of American Abstract Expressionists who utilized the method from about 1950, it successfully evolved a richly emotive expressive style. Action painting was of major importance throughout the 1950s in Abstract Expressionism, the most-influential art movement in the United States.

Gentile’s action painting is direct, instinctual, and is a highly dynamic kind of painting that involves the spontaneous application of vigorous, sweeping brushstrokes and the chance effects of dripping and spilling paint onto the canvas. Her action paintings are an absolute devotion to unfettered personal expression free of all traditional aesthetic and social values. Gentile’s paintings reflect the influence of the “automatic” techniques developed in Europe in the 1920s and ’30s by the Surrealists.

Her paintings are designed to awaken unconscious associations in the viewer, the automatic approach of these action paintings are primarily conceived as a means of giving instinctive creative forces free play and of revealing these forces directly to the viewer. In action painting the act of painting itself, being the moment of the artist’s creative interaction with her materials, is as significant as her finished work.

Known for her fiercely independent style of painting, her canvases with their compression of brushstrokes and the all-over splatters are tucked beneath swirling arcs giving her canvases a sense of touch and facture. Her highly distinctive and feathery, slashing, rhythmically thoughtful undergrowth of paint are strangely eloquent and in gendered terms, they synthesize ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ divisions at the same time empowering the importance of Gentile’s pervasive compressive arcs. These self- contained arcs synthesize both directions, suggesting a union of centrifugal and centripetal forces, inside and outside. Standing before  these daunting works, they do seem to both implode and explode at the same time. But it’s the magenta and other dayglow tones that are particularly intriguing. While there is nothing explicitly feminine about these works—if we’re talking gender stereotypes, their gestural brushwork is more aligned with the boldness of action painting and the palette is that of graffiti artist. These are the spray can colors of the NYC graffiti street artists—tools these artists used to tag walls, subways and buildings in NYC in the 1970s. But in these paintings, Gentile seems voluntarily exposed the viewer to her raw electric creative energy , as though she’s magically turned her surfaces inside out and liberated herself from within.

Some of her collection has been acquired by Billboard Magazine owner and Hard Rock Casino investor David Saltz, and has been featured in LA Magazine among other publications. Janene is currently represented by the Tivoli Artists Gallery, Tivoli, NY and can be seen in NYC at the Art Central Galleria, 108 Central Park S. NYC.

Title: "Abstraction"

Where: Coldwell Banker Village Green Realty: 268 Fair Street, Kingston, NY 12401

When: Open 9-5 Daily Through June 7, 2023 | 845-331-5357