Gracie DeVito + Andy Giannakakis is an exhibition comprised of two paintings, one by each of the aforementioned artists. The two share a sense of immersion, told in the intimacy of scale and fixation of touch. Through this, their work has a contemporary quality, emphasizing the painting’s existence as a matter of its making.

Inspired by Leon Kossoff’s preoccupation with transcription, here DeVito uses the method to her own unique ends. Kossoff had described how transcription of a masterpiece brings a deep formal and physical understanding that the painter can utilize in original ways. A continuity with the history of western painting is forged. Here the reference, Poussin’s A Bacchanalian Revel Before a Term, is not coincidental. It is a painting Kossoff had also transcribed, but what DeVito makes clear is the process is never absent of an agent who experiences what they paint. DeVito’s is transcription without telos, where the means are the ends.

Similarly, Giannakakis’s paintings have been described as “ambulatory”. We might receive this sense at moments when the work verges on description: green means foliage. But the ambulatory quality can also be attributed to its dissolving forms and layers, creating a temporal ambiguity that implies duration. The process of looking becomes inextricable from the process of its creation, an absorption in aimlessness. As such, the painting recalls the abstractions that occur between observation and thought when our legs, eyes, and minds are made to wander.

To look at these paintings is different from looking at a Poussin, or at Frenhofer’s unknown masterpiece which Giannakakis’s painting might resemble. It’s different because they’re not the same “painting”, seventeenth century painting is a noun whereas here it is undoubtedly a verb. The aesthetic experience in these works is a vicarious sense of the artist’s immersion in their activity.