Doug Reina’s first solo exhibition at Gallery North, Prolonged Perception: Recent Paintings by Doug Reina highlights the artist’s exploration of obscure, ordinary spaces of contemporary life that are often shielded from view. Austere, brooding compositions, Reina’s paintings find a dream-like emptiness within back streets, shacks, and overgrown backyards. Each painting begins black. Color and form are added over a black ground, lifting them out of the picture plane. Colors blast forth. There are broad flashes of light, but the black ground remains visible everywhere. It pops out between brushstrokes or creates a colossal abyss below buildings, pulling the rug out from underneath them. There is a rootlessness here. We wander in some lucid dream, half remembered; amid dark voids and divine light. He leads us into a space of sharp contrasts, one in which our eye fragments into the surface it contemplates.

A two-time Pollock-Krasner Foundation grant recipient, Doug Reina has been a Long Island-based painter for 30 years. His artwork has been exhibited in galleries and museums nationally, and is included in significant private and public collections. Apart from his painting, Reina is a cartoonist whose work has appeared in the New Yorker magazine as well as with King Features Syndicate. He also co-curated the group exhibition Face to Face: Artists Painting Artists, at the Long Island Museum in 2019, was a co-founder of the North Shore Artists Coalition, and co-created LIMarts, a collaborative arts group for the Long Island Museum. He is also a Trustee of the Long Island Museum, has served on the Exhibition Committee for the Art League of Long Island, and teaches private studio classes at his studio in Setauket, New York.

This exhibition is generously sponsored by Jefferson’s Ferry, the Michael & Ronne Cosel Foundation, bld Architecture, and Suffolk County’s Department of Economic Development and Planning.