How to Face Unstable Encounters

Crank up your screen brightness and zoom in on these! I’m saying this because otherwise you might miss all the goodness happening in these habitually unlit, murky paintings that Alessandra Acierno painted for her LA debut currently on view at Sea View Gallery.

From time to time, an exhibition comes around that hits the right spot. Sadly, I won’t be seeing these in person, but I can imagine how special they are when every image popping on my screen triggers a fresh wave of wow in my chest. The show might’ve been titled What We Do in The Shadows (which it isn’t), because these chronically murky, exceptionally moody paintings feel like they don’t really want you to see them at all. And this makes the observation process so rewarding.

Let’s start with the narrative aspect where images focus on “moments of slippage,” as Acierno described during our virtual studio visit. Built on the coexistence of dichotomies, the scenes are packed with unclear boundaries between violence and intimacy, imagination and reality, potential and uncertainty. The subjects of self-formation and the double, as psychological and visual motifs, evoke an almost palpable 19th-century family-novel drama, a quality emphasized by the work’s deliberate antique, aged appeal.

Essentially, Acierno’s painting process boils down to balancing comfort and discomfort, unafraid of expressive, deliberately anti-naturalistic form and color. The resulting “unspecificness,” the vagueness of time, place, or circumstances, holds the scene’s moral, atmospheric, and even conceptual ambiguity. And “accidental” elements such as a copper-like sky, rubber-hose anatomy, or an occasional wandering eye increase the psychological intensity. This aligns with her belief that “the surface of the painting is almost as important as the painting itself,” and by painting on gritty ground, the process builds rich texture into the work. While balancing loose and tight, bright and dark, Acierno appreciates when “wrong things happen the right way,” giving the painting something you can’t plan up front. And this makes me particularly excited about a project we have coming up in 2027. —Saša Bogojev