It’s late winter in these parts, and a cold ocean breeze/gale is making most East Hampton Main Street promenading brisk under the best conditions. There is some color beginning to pop from the ground in the green shoots of daffodils, the yellow and purple flowers of crocuses, and the tiny red buds emerging on the end of tree branches.
Up on its second-floor perch at 55 Main Street, the Drawing Room gallery reflects this world, filled with work by five of its regular stable of artists — Gustavo Bonevardi, Sue Heatley, Hector Leonardi, Vincent Longo, and Aya Miyatake — who inadvertently express through abstraction and their own processes what it feels and looks like outside.
Mr. Bonevardi’s drawings on wood fiber board with charcoal and accentuated by acrylic paint are architecturally inspired, but also evince the organic geometry of nature. Titled for the letters of the alphabet, each piece subtly mimics the lines and curves of the symbol for which it is named. The semicircular imagery in these works, which are set on vast brown grounds, are reminiscent of the earth as it is about to spring back into technicolor, as patches of white and blue flowers push through it. The gallery has said it sees similarities with various elements of a sailboat, which underlines the universality of the artist’s approach.
The allusions to landscape in the titles of Ms. Heatley’s work, such as “The Road We Took,” seem like a red herring at first. The images she creates feel entirely made up and very distant from real phenomena. Upon closer consideration, one can see references to mountains and eddies, clouds, and plant life. There is an element of early modernism, made at a time when artists began to understand what the ground looked like when perched from high above, in aircraft or very tall buildings. At times the landscapes also seem internal in a way that is mysterious and captivating. Their spareness reflects a similar aesthetic to the outside world, a barrenness that is being replaced by some appealing content.
Mr. Leonardi’s square abstractions are spare and muted. The compositions he assembles from dried paint strips cut in his studio and applied to the canvas have some bright colors in them, but they are subsumed in a murky mist or a subtle blue fog. There is a sense of the underlying collaged color ready to unleash the vitality contained within, a subtle thrumming of a life force coming into being under the surface.
In his 1970s paintings, Mr. Longo, who died in 2017, used a grid in a way familiar from Sol LeWitt, whose work became synonymous with pattern and geometry. Because the resulting compositions are so removed from reality, they can become an open vessel for scores of interpretations. There is a push-pull dynamic between each colored or shaded and masked-off triangle that makes up a square, which in turn forms a field that fills the expanse of the canvas. A suggestion of paned or stained glass, Eastern mosaics, or things as mundane as a radiator cover or a plot of germinating seeds all seem possible as subjects for which the abstraction is a stand-in. Apprehending them is an exercise of meditation on their natural and spiritual structures.
In her often ovate alabaster sculptures, Ms. Miyatake frequently offers us the most enduring symbol of spring of all. Their polished tones of pink, amber, and gray remind us of the subtler decorations of Easter and the restrained beauty of the natural world as new life forms emerge from their shells.
Viewed apart, these works would not likely evoke such a vernal yearning, but the gallery directors’ eyes — as discerning as ever — have chosen works that make the whole something much more elevated than each work on its own. They have assembled a room of artworks that speak to one another in a way that creates an entirely new and compelling conversation, what only the best curation can do.
The exhibition will remain on view through March 22.
