Danielle Roberts

Fredericks & Freiser is pleased to announce “Evening All Day,” Danielle Roberts’ first solo exhibition in New York. In her moody and atmospheric paintings, Roberts explores the various psychological states brought on by her generation's societal instability. Roberts’ settings - strip mall parking lots, living room sofas, city rooftops, and outdoor parks - are familiar to wide audiences. Yet, when rendered with otherworldly color and dramatic chiaroscuro, they feel transitory and strange. Unstable emotions are communicated through uncanny lighting –both phenomenal and foreboding– and fragmented coloration that coalesces differently across canvases. Some figures are made up of geometric patches of hues that are visually delineated from each other. In contrast, other bodies are made up of a similar patchwork of coloration but by swaths that blur together slightly.

Solitude follows Roberts’ figures as they amble across an urban landscape populated by friends, lovers, and passersby. These transitory moments, at once together yet disconnected, all seem to be anticipating something just out of reach. A cinematic atmosphere bolstered by an artificial light imbues these scenes with Roberts’ signature radiant glow. The vivid and dark mood matches the internal, untethered state of the figures who seem oddly stuck. They wander as if they are perpetually spending their last $20 on another round of drinks.

Roberts does not shy away from discomfort and awkwardness in her worlds. She hones in on the pathos of her own experiences and those of her peers which are at once individual, unique to each of Roberts’ figures, and universal, instantly recognizable to audiences. The artist does not retreat into her painted worlds as an escape from the overwhelming anxiety and instability coursing through contemporary society; instead, she pushes right up against them, opening those spaces onto her audiences. There is an insistence on life and desire, even if those desires are complicated. The people of her scenes - withdrawn and ambivalent - wade through the mess, surviving on their own terms.