On Oct. 4, Judith Singelis celebrated a birthday of sorts — not her own, but the anniversary of her Lakeville gallery, Argazzi Art, which she opened to the day, twenty years ago. Now the sole rotating exhibition gallery left in the town of Salisbury, Argazzi stands as both an outlier and a beacon of longevity as more women-owned businesses continue to spring up in the neighborhood.
Previously a gallery owner for twenty years in Sun Valley, Idaho, Singelis came to the Northwest Corner of Connecticut on a whim. “I didn’t do any research about Lakeville; I stumbled upon it. I just really wanted to be here. I thought the community was engaging, and this building was beautiful, so I bought it.”
The works she gravitates toward are often broad-stroked acrylics or oils, freehanded and emotional sweeps and streaks of paint that embrace the artist’s effort instead of disguising it. You can see it in Victor Mirabelli’s ghostly white farmhouses fading into distance like a daylight moon, in Liz Decheimer’s abstract constellations, spilling over like a waterfall, growing like ivy, forming new clusters and shapes.
Singelis leaves them open to the viewer. “Art is so subjective. It’s subjective to the person viewing it, writing about it. It’s completely discretionary, and there’s no right or wrong.”
In her current show of work by Suzanne Onordera, the painterly abstract landscapes evoke the ballet pinks and earthly garden greens of Jean-Honoré Fragonard’s Rococo paintings, stripped of their literal scenes but sprightly in their pops of detail and lush in their depiction of a deep forest of delights.
