RJ Messineo
The Gleaners, Feb 28 – Apr 12, 2025

CANADA is pleased to announce The Gleaners, RJ Messineo’s third one-person exhibition with the gallery. For the last six years, Messineo has employed a unique device for making paintings that involves attaching thin plywood rectangles to the surfaces of their canvases with magnets. Over the course of making a painting they shift the panels around, adding, removing and interchanging them. The plywood often becomes embedded in passages of thick paint or leaves ghostly traces, like the impression of a leaf on wet concrete, after they are removed. The studio is filled with stacks of these previously used boards, leaning against the wall and piled up everywhere you look. Over time, they have become a glossary of Messineo’s painting language.

History Painting 2025, one of the largest works in the show, consists of these previously used plywood panels that are set in an irregular grid across the surface of four joined canvases; each busy with multi-colored gestures, impressions, stains and drips. Messineo orchestrates a multilevel painted experience, with the panels either interrupting or sustaining passages that contrast or are in conversation with different planes of the painting. If that wasn't enough, Messineo presents a third type of intervention by attaching small monochromatic panels along the outer edge like jagged teeth. The rich variety of disparate elements jostle and butt up against each other, creating surprising relationships. 

Two paintings that share a size and shape, Earth Blue, 2025 and The Literal and Unsymbolic Day, 2025 elaborate on the modular improvisational possibilities of constructing a painting out of parts. In these paintings, the smaller monochromatic panels appear again but in one they are compressed into the center of the composition and in the other a singular yellow rectangle perches within a large empty central space. The edges where the canvases touch are laden with the interchange and back-sprays of color. The gaps and open spaces that are created from the mismatched rectangles are central to the energy the paintings generate.

Messineo’s paintings engage with a wide range of source material. In the studio they explore personal relationships to vision, color, texts, and especially the study of other paintings, all of which serve to guide their exploration of form and visual language. Messineo’s practice uses change as the primary organizing principle. By design, their compositions are rearranged and reconstituted, the end point always in question. Changing the context and taking these works from the studio into the gallery continues this process, offering new arrangements and possibilities for these works.

RJ Messineo (b. 1980) was born in Hartford, CT and lives and works in Greenfield, MA. Their work has been exhibited at CANADA, New York; Morán Morán, Los Angeles; Below Grand, New York; Night Gallery, Los Angeles; The Ranch, Montauk; Pace Gallery, New York; Thomas Erben Gallery, New York; Ceysson & Benetiere, Wandhaff, Luxembourg; James Cohan Gallery, New York; Armory Center for the Arts, Pasadena; Clifton Benevento Gallery, New York; Artist Curated Projects, Los Angeles; and REDCAT, Los Angeles, among others. Messineo’s work is included in the Dallas Museum of Art’s permanent collection. They received their BFA from Cornell University in 2002 and MFA from UCLA in 2009.

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