Sweet Relief

Eli Ridgway Gallery is pleased to present Sweet Relief, an exhibition of new works by Matthew Palladino — his newest and largest to date. Palladino uses sculptural relief to create painted objects that defy easy narrative understanding and categorization. Enamel-coated plaster casts are pulled from commercial chocolate molds of nude figures, fruits, and assorted domestic objects. Both pre-fabricated and meticulously hand-made, these reliefs make visual reference to his paintings but extend literally into three dimensions.

His deadpan reproduction of banal objects — made twice functionless, removed by two degrees of separation from their original state as "familiar things" — sustains the dark humor that runs through all his work. Because the molds are made specifically for chocolate-making, for objects meant to be eaten, the resulting casts also function as a playful critique of the tenuous relationship between the artist as producer and the viewer or collector as consumer. Drawing on the interplay between high and low cultural production, Sweet Relief explores the histories of the ready-made and the hand-made, the naive and the sophisticated, painting and sculpture, and the infinite potential in between.