Charles Billich

Billich’s paint­ings read as smoothly as pho­tos. They are com­posed mostly of archi­tec­tural ele­ments with arbi­trary touches of human fig­ures and stat­ues. The major­ity of sub­ject mat­ter is depicted in a flat­tened, slick man­ner, with a con­sis­tently ultra smooth gra­da­tion. Despite these flat­tened sur­faces, the scenes com­posed in these paint­ings are arranged in so many lay­ers that the pic­ture as a whole per­pet­u­ates a great sense of depth. Microen­vi­ron­ments are found within the larger pic­ture many times over. Sharp, mir­rored archi­tec­tural spaces can be dis­cov­ered exist­ing inside each other. Whispy, soft blues, pinks, and pur­ples and the hyper-smoothed, pol­ished shad­ing are shared in both the objects and atmos­pheric space, mak­ing for an illu­sory feel. Some of the paint­ings seem to par­al­lel the set­ting of a gal­ley or museum, hav­ing spa­cious walls with images hung about them. Within each image there is a newly con­structed space, how­ever, there is often a sim­i­lar atmos­phere or color scheme that con­nects the images to the walls and to the sur­round­ing space that it exists within. And the walls them­selves seep in and out of antony­mous col­ors and shades, decon­struct­ing the solid­ity and truth of the walls, mak­ing for an oth­er­worldly ambiance. A com­pli­cated, con­fused space is the result, some­thing quite sur­real and dream­like, leav­ing the viewer ques­tion­ing exactly what is what, and what is a pos­si­ble reflec­tion, or even an imagining.