Rousseau on Aquilino

John Aquilino has been one of my favorite DC area painters since he moved from New York to the Maryland suburbs a few years ago. His landscapes are elegant and intelligent, and under the pretext of being an urban landscape, are really all about the handling of light and form, not really the subject matter.

He currently has an exhibition in Bethesda's Neptune Gallery, and like any other Aquilino shows in galleries and art fairs, it is selling out very quickly.

Dr. Claudia Rousseau of the Gazette newspapers reviews that show here and once again I wonder why this very talented bilingual art critic is not writing for the Washington Post (which owns the Gazette chain).

Aquilino is also a master of light, as in a painting like "No Parking" in which the angled sunlight falls sharply on the garage walls. These harsh contrasts of light and shadow are reminiscent of Edward Hopper, or even more of Charles Sheeler in the 1920s and '30s; the two are important 20th century American precedents for Aquilino's style. Like Hopper and Sheeler, realism is tempered with an abstract sensibility to underlying form, and a tendency toward simplification and reduction to emphasize the juxtaposition of shape and color. Hopper often included the human figure, bringing a sense of narrative into his work. Although Sheeler's cityscapes and paintings of factories eliminated the figure, there was always a hidden discourse about progress in them. It is this narrative element Aquilino seems to reject.