Soothing, Luscious Light At Ober Gallery

When the air doesn’t move with a single breeze and the temperature reaches the mid 80s, but feels like the mid 90s, step into Rob Ober’s intimate gallery in the Kent Barns complex and submit yourself to the cooling effects of Karen LeSage’s palette.

For this midsummer month Ober has shifted his penchant for the dark and emotional for the latest of LeSage’s saturated and airy landscape series. Paintings titled “Blue Birches II,” “Purple Twilight,” “Chartreuse Elms,” “April Crimson,” and “Violet Pines” take the eye on a wonderfully fluctuating trip across color fields where the emotional, and seemingly impulsive, meet the cerebral. 

LeSage’s sensitive and critical eye knows that her paintings will change, like a Monet landscape, under varying conditions of light, weather or season of the year. But therein lies the fun of living with her work. Context and temperament are everything. Frosty, off white skies band above hazy mauve and mulberry foliage above screens of contrasting indigo and ochre foregrounds, with teasing dashes of warm pinks and cool turquoise in the corners. LeSage’s lacy agitated strokes of layered colors shimmer and her landscape forms are reduced to the minimum, leaving us to admire a textured surface that conveys atmosphere and temperature and mirrors back to us the luster of our mood. 

Thirteen gestural oil paintings in warm gray frames line the gallery walls. Most are filled expansively to the frame edges with either a tree or a forest. “Summer Lake,” a wide and luminous landscape reduced to four soft bands of varying width of sublime hues, sweeps us toward a vista of one of the cooling glacial remnants of this region. “Cherry Blooms,” with its focus of one central tree, is painted in wild dancing calligraphic marks of warm and cool pinks, grays and whites. It seems LeSage painted in fits bursting out of cabin fever. Three paintings stand out for their switch in perspective. Looking at “Treetops II,” the upward shift in LeSage’s viewpoint and the sky’s explosive brushwork of light, remind one of the ecstatic trees of landscape painter Emily Carr and the spiritualist wilderness tradition. Still filling the frame with “One Sun,” LeSage takes the glowing winter sun and presents it as cool as an iced cucumber slice. The third shifted perspective painting, a white Malevich-like cross called “Four Corners,” speaks to a sense of self mapping. A gauzy white X of varying tones marks the spot where we all take refuge from our daily sufferings, whether it be weather or politics, and find ourselves in the sanctuary of LeSage’s brushwork. 

No need to work hard to imagine the work over your mantel. A loyal collector base is heralded in decorator magazines across the region. Le Sage’s paintings lower the blood pressure and fill the space with soft light. 

Karen Le Sage’s exhibit  “New Paintings” is open through Aug. 4 at Ober Gallery, 6 North Main St., Kent, CT.  The opening reception is Saturday, July 13, from 4-6 p.m. For more information go to www.obergallery.com