Sandra Lee Gallery presents a juxtaposition of two artists, Gregg Chadwick and Evri Kwong, working on opposite ends of the painterly spectrum. Chadwick’s oil paintings evoke distant memories that suddenly pull the viewer back to another time and place while Kwong’s illustrative drawings and paintings confront viewers with dramatic stories. The pairing of these two artists creates a compelling balance between poetics and narratives.

Gregg Chadwick’s new series, Revenant, exposes moments of clarity in the hazy, ghostlike recollections from events past. Each painting is worked through a series of sessions where the surface is scraped down, overpainted, and layered with transparent pigments. This results in remnants of past figures and locations emerging from the foggy memories on the canvas. The fluid movement of the visible brush strokes is a reminder that as these figures and moments passed, so will the stories we have yet to experience.

In contrast with Gregg’s romantic ghosts, Evri Kwong uses satire to portray the social injustices of everyday American life. Kwong uses his tremendous drawing and painting skills to create single canvas juxtapositions. One half of the canvas is painted in vibrant oil tones of red and yellow while the other half shows domestic characters, sketched expertly with Sharpie pen on a flat color background, telling the story of our society’s loss of humanity ever-present in our consumer driven culture. The figures, called Howdy Doody Puppets, are dehumanized, blocky, faceless creatures with Pinocchio-esque noses that have been present in most of his work for the last several decades

Chadwick and Kwong tell tales through the human figure. Whether they are in opposition or exploring comparable ideas is up to audience interpretation.