Continuing through September 27, 2026

Andrew Catanese paints with such a variety of textures and brushstrokes as to invoke a feeling of hypersensitivity in us. While my eye wandered through the lush environs of Catanese’s landscape paintings in their exhibition, “I Watched Your Leaves Grow Silver in the Wind,” I found myself noting that almost every one of these works has, among the wealth of flora, a hidden critter just perceptible in the shadows. 

That reminded me of one of the pleasures to be encountered in the art of the Bay Area Figurative Abstractionists: the way that one’s eye can enjoy the sweeps and rhythms of color until you realize, “I think I’ve missed the forest for the trees,” because you suddenly make out a figure hiding in plain sight. Born in 1993, thus generations removed from the likes of Diebenkorn, Bischoff and Oliveira, Catanese was raised in Virginia but nevertheless, through their years studying and teaching at Stanford, they became aware of their work and was influenced by it.

The paintings are dense and heavily impastoed, contrasted occasionally by depictions of open fields in a flatter style that balances the intensity of the brushwork. At times they use the point of the brush handle to carve lines into the surface that accentuate, say, the leaf structure of a bush. The painterly abstraction dominates, relieved by episodes of representation or, alternatively, the abstract brushwork accumulates into becoming a landscape. 

The largest piece, “It Won’t Stop the Leaves from Growing,” is a six-foot wide diptych that could pass for an abstract swirl of colorful leafy shapes surrounding a blue form in the shape of a reverse letter C until it clicks into place as a body of water. The scene is inspired by Point Lobos, near Carmel. Much of the work is begun in plein air, then later expanded and resolved in the studio.

Catanese is a passionate hiker and birder, and that knowledge shows in the confident rendering of wilderness and especially birds, dogs and other small animals. They render these creatures with a few deft brushstrokes that capture an intelligence, a mind at work behind their eyes. They’re not engaged with the viewer, as they suggest attention to their surroundings and strategies for survival. In “Fishmarket Gardian” a black crowned night heron gazes to the right, his grey breast orchestrated from at least six different colors that dominate the composition. He perches calmly on a tree branch amid three small orange blossoms. 

In most of Catanese’s work, incongruous small flecks of color interfere with one’s reception of the image, like scratches on the surface of an old motion picture, reminding us that this is not documentation but a deliberately conceived art object. In a work featuring a night heron, “A House on Every Corner, a Fish in Every Mouth,” the artist comes out of their comfort zone of dense foliage: the bird, its wings awkwardly flexed, dominates the left third of the canvas, while an abstracted beachscape takes up the majority of the composition.

Human figures appear in three of the sixteen paintings. In “The Way I Remember It and the Way That It Was” (a great title), three young people bathe up to their necks in a pond surrounded by underbrush, gazing to the left beyond the edge of the canvas. We can’t help but superimpose or intuit a social dynamic onto the two young women and one man, especially as their reflections in the water offer six different ways of regarding the dynamics among them. They make no eye contact with one another, and all share a sad mien that conveys that we are all but drowning in the details of our lives. In “Another River Beneath Us,” a female figure, her back to us, stands in the forest looking across a river towards a lovely green meadow on the other side. It’s a distant prospect full of a suggested mysterious promise that is beyond the mundane.