Amy Cuneo’s subjects link us to essential and reassuring elements in our lives. Flowers, food, a window framing the sky, these are images that bind, as clearly as their colours shift under changing light. Her everyday assemblages weave with lived experience and the natural world. Begun in December 2019, the comforts of home are pictured here in their intimate objecthood. Cuneo’s colour is instinctive and wonderfully surprising. Tinted complementary pairings describe shadows cast by the moon. The shimmer and optical mixing connects her to the modernism of Pierre Bonnard but her acrylic painting is more planar. This leaves her gestures intact as she moves across surfaces.
Titles like “Silent Night / Egg Toast” suggest the way the works have emerged around the activities of family life. And although the artist’s studio is now separate from the daily workings of the home, the images maintain a loose anchor with that world. There is a lot of responding as she goes which allows her to build density in certain areas while leaving other surfaces washy. The paintings are composites, a meshing of invention and record. They generate an echo of objects lived with and understood from various angles and qualities of light.
-Melody Willis
