Plaines & Mines, d’Ombre 2025.1 is a vibrant and intricate painting on wood created through the use of stencils, airbrushing, and pyrography. A hand-painted grid in vivid tones of electric blue, deep purple, and warm brown dissolves into itself, while angular and curvilinear forms—alongside sweeping organic gestures and sharp, hard-edged geometric fragments—float across the surface, punctuating the grid and creating a sense of rhythm and structure.
This dynamic contrast between precision and fluidity embodies Metzger’s signature use of a mechanical approach to reach the sublime. A deliberate and calculated composition is meticulously constructed, only to be disrupted and potentially defaced through an unforgiving final transformative intervention. The painting evokes mysterious, shifting landscapes, reminiscent of natural phenomena filtering through an obscured surface, inviting contemplation on impermanence and perception. Plaines & Mines, d’Ombre 2025.1 offers a meditation on fragility, transformation, and the sublime within abstraction.
*This piece comes ready to hang with natural wood edges.
keywords; wood, Patterns, Geometric Abstraction, Contemporary gestural abstraction, intentionally exposed wood, Abstract Art, Striped, maximalisme, Abstract Painting, Pixelated, Repetition, Linear Forms, curvilinear, grid, linear grid, dynamism, pyrography, materiality, soft, blurred, complex, hard-edged, line, form and color, multilayered, geometry, atmospheric, optical, distressed surfaces, wood, Minimalism and Contemporary Minimalist, Abstract, Modern, Abstract Expressionism, Spray Paint, Acrylic, stencil, optical, visual perception, stripes, painting, chance, gradients, ombre, process-oriented, female painters, 21st century, woman artists, rectangular
About artist:
In Melisa Taylor’s work, the natural world acts as blueprint while ideas are sourced from historical art and contemporary culture. She pursued studies in Marine Biology before training in classical art of the Old Masters. She grew fascinated by the works of Flemish painters Vermeer and Rembrandt whose symbolic use of light influences her practice up to this day. Melisa explores the notion of the sublime through blur and precision. She develops an aesthetic of duality by hybridizing divergent approaches to art. Her studio practice is labor-intensive; various instruments and electric tools are used out-of-context to inject unpredictability in the painting gesture. She has assimilated to her visual language an eclectic multilayering process combining pyrography, sanding and detailed stencil compositions on wood. Embracing chance is a central idea in her work, equally so is meticulous control. This results in a subterranean tension that jeopardizes the ethereal appearance of her pieces; arbitrariness and mechanical execution fuse to create what she calls "systèmes faillibles" where spectral motifs seek to emerge out of obscuring lattices. Her work has been exhibited internationally and acquired in private and corporate collections across North America, Europe and Asia.