Review: Restraint, exuberance in the paintings of Maureen Gallace

Maureen Gallace’s paintings offer refuge. Each panel features a single New England farm or beach house, a cluster of flowers or stretch of sea. Intimate in scale (from 9 inches by 12 inches to 14 by 18), each presents a compact opportunity for private reverie.

The images have the purity and serenity that Matisse dreamed art could invoke when he compared it to a comfy armchair. Gallace’s paintings are no mere soporifics, however, any more than Matisse’s were.

The 10 recent works now at Overduin and Kite are physically vital objects, their surfaces restless with short, fleeting strokes of color and light. There’s more than a hint of Fairfield Porter threading through. And in an image like “October,” the architecture reads as grave, minimalist sculpture.

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Gallace, based in New York, generates some modest friction by oscillating between restraint and exuberance. She paints the white-trimmed gray dwellings as austere presences, often windowless and mute, but set within an unabashedly sensual landscape, generous and unfettered.

Ultimately, it’s this duality within the works that keeps them from idling in decorative safety. Gallace plays domestic stability and structure off of the wild fluidity growing just outside the door. She sets contained order against the contingent, gravity against buoyancy.

She seats us in that comfy armchair, in the path of a bracing wind.

Overduin and Kite, 6693 Sunset Blvd., L.A., (323) 464-3600, through Oct 26. www.overduinandkite.com