DOUGLAS MELINI: Under Your Skin and Over the Moon

"His work stands out for his use of stippling to create elaborately raised textures that defy the eye’s effort to flatten the surface into a consistently modeled plane…The surface at first reinforces, then subtly contradicts, any first impression that the outer layer of the raised textures is the natural extension of the paintings’ original subjects."

- Dan Cameron in "Deep Surface"

"Although each form is clearly distinguished by shape and color, the extreme impasto Melini has patiently built up through months of adding new layers and letting them dry, causes the edges between shapes to blur and become indistinct. The closer we move in to examine the painting’s surface, the more the divisions between distinct forms start to break down, as if they were chalk scrawled on asphalt rather than oil paint meticulously applied to stretched linen."

- Dan Cameron in "Deep Surface"

"In As If In Space (2024), a deep black provides the ground for what appears to be a fast-growing lichen colony coming together in a lime-green central ridge, then falling away on both sides to a deep forest green, dotted by pulsing blue-white nodules."

- Dan Cameron in "Deep Surface"

"One way to think about his goal is by imagining what happens when we magnify a photograph of a tiny fragment of nature. When we try to achieve resolution of the image past a certain degree of magnification, the contrast between the image and its surroundings starts to dissolve. If we then consider how in recent decades we have accustomed ourselves to visually decoding the ways that color pixels, which we might imagine as digital proxies for microscopic particles, produce similar margins of retinal indeterminacy, we can begin to appreciate how Melini’s technique acts to insert a type of visual buffer between ourselves and the level of visual verisimilitude that would result if there were crisp details and tidy edges all the way down to a subatomic level."

- Dan Cameron in "Deep Surface"

"Douglas Melini offers a way of perceiving natural form and beauty that enables us to remain attuned to our perceptual shortcuts, while sidestepping some of the hubris underlying any presumption that nature begins and ends at the limits of our own sensorial understanding."

- Dan Cameron in "Deep Surface"