Eric White's Cinematic Truth

Eric White has always thought about painting as something like a movie screen. But he never painted the blockbuster’s apex moments, but more of the subtle in-between action moments, where the camera is moving us through to a different angle, a different character. White is looking there, not at the forgotten moments, but the quiet spaces between crescendos. His eye turns to the transitional moments—the seconds between words in a conversation, the breath between sleeping and waking—painting the emotional residue that clings to everyday spaces long after the action has moved elsewhere.

But it is the way he frames it. It’s a painting that looks like cinema inside a canvas that doesn’t allow for a moving image. I think that is often a fun play between White in the viewer; he draws you in with a familiar aesthetic of classic film, but creates a sensory limit in the stillness of a canvas. It’s quite a fantastic interplay. In Vignettes & Mutations, White’s new show at GRIMM Gallery in NYC, is playing with the framework of a painting, of an image, of what we can be familiar with as a viewer as a device to see. It’s like a conversation on the ways we understand image-making, where we understand iconography but also the ways in which moving images are shared through culture.

Each painting carries the nostalgic ache of phantom cinema, the bittersweet recognition of scenes that feel more real than reality, pulled from the collective unconscious where all the films we've never seen continue playing in an endless loop. What we haven’t seen we understand, what we don’t know is familiar. —Evan Pricco