Berryhill has the ability to bring you to a place where you can never be sure of what you’re looking at.
John Yau
October 8, 2017
Michael Berryhill has a fondness for fluorescent paints. His luminous palette — which includes dollops of Veronese green, tangerine orange, Van Gogh yellow, velvety violets, and cake frosting pink — makes me think of radioactive popsicles. He matches his quirky palette with equally zany pictorial inventions that tread the tricky ground between abstraction and representation. A group of these paintings can be seen in his current exhibition, Michael Berryhill: A Window, Adore, at Kate Werble Gallery (September 9 – October 28, 2017). According to the gallery press release: Michael Berryhill partakes in a type of painterly pareidolia, the visual and psychological experience of seeing faces in otherwise unfamiliar patterns, finding meaning in its absence.
Pareidolia — which could also be called the art of seeing faces in unusual places (Jesus in a tree trunk or a taco) — suggests some kind of trickery or artistic sleight-of-hand. Occultists were believers and charlatans capitalized on it, but artists for the most part have eschewed it. Pavel Tchelitchew’s “Hide and Seek” (1940-42), which went from being the most popular painting in the Museum of Modern Art’s collection to being banished into storage for many years before being placed in a hallway to be passed by, is probably the best known example; “Hide and Seek” suffers from its aching Romantic seriousness, which is hardly a crime...
