Rory Berthiaume

Psychic Readings is pleased to present Rory Berthiaume’s Edging, a solo show exhibiting a series of new paintings.

"Day after day, day after day,

We stuck, nor breath nor motion;

As idle as a painted ship

Upon a painted ocean."

—Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “Rime of the Ancient Mariner”

In Edging, Berthiaume’s latest body of work, the viewer is seduced toward an abyssal space of spiritual delights. The paintings serve as individual testaments, transcendental snapshots of the artist’s private revelations on his voyage beyond the known, exposing our deep hunger, our hubris, the hypnotic compulsion to follow our auroral longings to what is always whispering from the lips of the horizon.

The paintings electrify the viewer with the ultraviolet of eros, the gloaming of ancestral whispers and the lemon halo of an ever-present catastrophe. Berthiaume harkens back to the High Renaissance masters employing sfumato, a color blending technique that eschews lines and instead lends a hazy and atmospheric quality to the work. This style that Da Vinci described as in the manner of smoke dissolves solid borders and undermines any strict delineation between figure and space supporting the metaphysical terrain of Berthiaume’s work where both personhood and permanence is permeable.

Whether an orb illumines a seraph, a prophet, or a delicious lover matters less than the spiritual transfusion taking place. Encountering the work beseeches the viewer to surrender to an ecstatic experience that, like the horizon the ancient mariner’s vessel points towards, lies just beyond our fingertips.

Before any climax there is a thrilling and arresting sense of doom. To view Berthiaume’s new work is to be reminded that we exist at the edge of understanding, the edge of war, the edge of climate disaster; we find ourselves still brushing against borders real and imaginary, tracing a sheet of skin thrumming with the threat of erasure, dancing toward a looming precipice only to swoon past the breakers. To enter into Berthiaume’s work is to, in turn, enter into the human story where we are forever suspended in one eternal crepuscular hour. Rory Berthiaume’s Edging poses the question: how long has man been teasing the ineffable without release?

—Julie Schulte

Rory Berthiaume (b. 1984, Oregon, USA) is an American painter based in New York City. His work spans abstract, figurative and landscape scenes of varying scale from intimate miniatures to life-sized, world-immersive views. Through a repetitive process of erasure and re-articulation, he breathes life into static images, introducing pentimento and inviting complexities that defy the confines of certainty.

Berthiaume graduated from the School of Visual Arts NYC in 2007. Influential to his artistic formation and development has been the mentorship of painters Alfred Kelley, Arvie Smith, Jack Whitten, Michael Goldberg and Lynton Wells. This is his second solo show with the gallery following his exhibition in 2023.