There’s just one more week to see Adam Lovitz’s show, Wedged Between Day and Night at Commonweal Gallery. I had the privilege to see the show on Saturday—a striking installation in the gallery’s new Olde Kensington location.
Turning the corner into the main gallery, I saw Lovitz’s work hanging on the exposed brick walls of the recently stripped interior. Like gems embedded in a cave wall, or forgotten treasures in an abandoned home, his paintings possess a materiality and history that echo the textural layers of the beautiful old building. It’s no surprise founder and director Alex Conner chose to work with Lovitz in this first show for the new space.
Adam Lovitz is a Philadelphia-based painter exploring embodiment and place through a practice devoted to collecting and layering. In his second collaboration with Commonweal Gallery, Lovitz’s paintings deal with the passage of time in a twisting, childlike way—a pleasant uncertainty where five minutes or an hour both feel eternal. There is wonder in the disjunction: the wedging of found objects into heavily worked surfaces, chalky and pitted like the surface of an unknown planet. The paintings tilt and shift with the architecture of the space, collapsing into and falling away from the walls. One particularly “naughty” painting hangs behind the stairs’ iron railing, forcing a specific viewing distance. The placement makes you wonder if perhaps the painting is in “time out.” Or are we?
I mention the architecture again because it’s difficult to separate these works from their current setting, which underscore so many of the themes Lovitz explores. Calling on childhood imagery—games, toys, and a cartoon aesthetic—I feel ready to embark on an imaginary exploration of the solar system, journeying to a forgotten time that illuminates the future.
Formally, the works employ bright colors, geometry, and layering, suggesting stories into which we can fall—comics where adventure calls and transports us wherever we wish to go. Is that not the spirit we need to navigate day-to-day life? Lovitz presents a willingness to play, to explore, to double back and the tools to construct our own stories in his abstractions.
Lovitz invites us into a world where time loops and imagination reigns, a world that resonates with the deep history permeating Commonweal’s walls. Visit 1341 N. Masher Street this Saturday between 10:00 AM and 7:00 PM to experience it yourself!
