Occupying a booth at Untitled at Art Miami for the Cristin Tierney gallery, Maureen O’Leary paints landscapes inspired by her trips to Puerto Rico or from around her Long Island Studio. Deceptively forthright and simple in their form and conception, O’Leary advances an argument for visual pleasure for pleasure’s sake. She relies on aleatoric line, pleasing amorphous forms, and sumptuous color that saturates the whole in organic manner. She also excels at marrying familiarity with sudden elements of compositional and formal surprise.
This particular collection of images are tall, narrow affairs. O’Leary states they are inspired by Roman columns or vertical friezes. The vertical format allows her to explore a certain continuity within the natural world, especially the world of the ocean and the jungle, which appears to be her main preoccupation. The eye is allowed to travel from the root to top of a jungle forest tree, and glimpse at the sky, or travel from the depths of the ocean to the top of a mountain above it.
She says as much in the title from the series From the Octopus to the Rainforest, which spans from a lone octopus in the ocean at the bottom, up past the beach, above a tangle of freeways, and finally to the top of the lush forested mountain, past another expanse of ocean, and finally to a blue green mountain crowning it, in flattened, almost fisheye lensed perspective. She has used a similar technique in her earlier portrayals of landscape and interiors, flattening the perspective so that more detail can be included.
