On Friday, June 26th, I went to the opening of “Studio Sessions,” at SoNa Gallery in Chicago, an exhibition done in collaboration with ENGAGE Projects featuring five artists.

The intent of the show is “to transform the gallery into an extension of the studio” by displaying works in varying stages of completion.

What I found most interesting were the artists who seemed eager to employ unusual and challenging techniques and materials, requiring more exacting discipline than typical for the medium chosen, leading nevertheless to a kind of liberation expressed in freedom of gesture and felicity of execution.

Margaret Welsh uses house paint on paper dropcloth and raw muslin, which should have resulted in a mess I suppose, but her broad brush strokes and choice of colors show an easy confidence and calligraphic sublimity contrasting with the flimsiness of the materials.

Matthew Girson paints on sheets of Yupo, a plastic material which is difficult to get paint even to adhere to. The images are built from small and careful brush strokes which add up to heavily-laden surfaces, from which emerge domestic still lifes suggesting a hard-earned sense of stability and home.

Nick Albertson starts with inkjet printer images on paper, then uses inkjet ink to airbrush additional forms freehand onto the surface. The resulting geometric shapes seem severe, but they have no boundaries except those that arise from color gradients. The result produces a subtle feeling of liberation or perhaps a simple sublimity of existence.

Noel Mercado’s fabric hanging Inheritance appears to be a quilt made of found commercial design material and vintage printed advertising matter. Despite the kitsch origins, the work achieves a kind of radiance of transcendence of the past.

bARBER produces painted assemblages and collages on paper, inspired by individual people, and work as portraits. They capture, in dynamic and symbolic terms, moments of emotional transformation or transition, reaching for a whole beyond the parts.