Madeline Gallucci brings her sweet trash inside Plug Projects
Romanticizing city living is easy in the abstract — so vibrant! so hectic! Then you’re faced with certain urban particulars. The smell of sun-scorched asphalt. The chalky splotches of pigeon shit on your just-washed car. Still life with dropped change and discarded condoms.
Confectionary, a collection of Madeline Gallucci’s paintings, wrings aesthetic pleasures from these unpleasant realities.
The solo exhibition, now showing at Plug Projects, is a fitting cap to Gallucci’s two-year Charlotte Street Urban Culture Project residency, where her downtown Kansas City studio offered the artist a bird’s-eye view of the street below. She has a microscopic eye for the seemingly ugly detail — the mundane, the overlooked, the disquietingly sticky — yet her lens is whimsy and her palette candy-colored.
“Oil Slick I” is one of the largest and most engaging works here. Printed on fabric paper, the digital image deconstructs oil’s iridescent shimmer into component colors. Isolated strokes of brown and red hold their own against puffy pink drips and green macro squiggles. Though Gallucci dissects her oil slick with a scientist’s precision, the painting still feels more representative than abstract. The view, not the subject, is distorted, pollution made a benign pleasure.
“Oil Slick II” tightens the focus further, offering a nearly atomic view of an oil slick on a much smaller canvas. But this acrylic-and-gouache painting feels claustrophobic by comparison. The spontaneous strokes and crowded composition never quite congeal into a satisfying whole.
From afar, bright gashes on a neutral backdrop that make up “Flesh Marks” evoke recyclables washed up on a beach. Up close, a ground of pink-tinged flesh tones emerges. This is undeniably skin, with scars rendered in highlighter yellow and pockmarks in thick, textured paint. Gallucci transforms ordinary imperfections (bruises, veins) into electric patterns to offer a sunny slant on scarification, a new way to imagine old hurts.
“Twinning” builds up heavy acrylic to duel with spray paint. Colors from other paintings synthesize here into a collage of floral pastels and heavy black pools. With this work, Gallucci expertly captures the tension between her sugary strokes and the dingier subjects that inspire them. The loose forms seem suspended in a transitory moment, threatening to sharpen and settle without warning. Mirages dazzle in front of us, and the light suggests the disorienting, split-second glare of headlights refracting in shimmering storefront glass.
“Confectionary,” the show’s titular work, creates a surface of latex and spray paint along the Solo Space’s widest wall. The primary-colored parallelogram is positioned like a staircase, and amoeba outlines seem to ascend from the borders as they swim toward a glowing center. A gentle white overlay of spray paint softens the shapes, like a dusting of powdered sugar.
Gallucci’s work seems best fitted to that large scale and that soft focus. Cramped paintings such as “Sweetmeat Redirects Here” narrow her view at the expense of curiosity and wonder. The glyphs visible in “Sweetmeat” are individually engaging, striated with color like the inside of a geode, but the forms are a bit too loud and neatly packed to allow the same contemplation that the rest of the exhibition inspires.
Still, the sweets on display at Plug encourage you to daydream new lives for the city’s mundane patterns. You’re unlikely to ooh over discarded chewing gum when you leave, but Confectionary invites an optimism worth entertaining. Trash, from a different vantage, can look oddly like treats.
