People of Earth! People of Maine! It’s true what you’ve heard: we are lucky to have been visited by the paintings from Nate Luce’s dreamy, yummy, gummy Warm Worm World, and they come in peace. They come in a variety of strange, soft colors like dragon pink and goo yellow and good green; they come in different sizes and dimensions and notions of what even is dimension; they come in textural presentations so playful you want to reach out and touch faith. You want to pick them up and hoist them in the air like sails, like signs, like windows.
The paintings in this collection don’t simply represent Warm Worm World — they gesture toward it, wherever it is. They communicate something like feedback from the ether between here and there, and nevertheless even the static noise is crystally clear like river water, or like a baby’s tears. There is real heart and soul in Luce’s work, and the soul is at once old and new, an interruption in the time-space continuum itself in the way that it floats through form and formlessness. There are figures, sure, and there are shapes, but these paintings don’t so much adhere to any one law of physics as they playfully challenge expectations of laws of physics. What I mean is: there is a beautiful kind of lightness that bounces off these pieces’ varied textural surfaces; the paintings are bioluminescent in this way, as well as they are confounding in the tensions they invite regarding, I don’t know, gravity, or what the show’s title painting seems to flirt between: heights AND depths. And so on, and so forth, and everything else. -Chelsea Harlan
This is a show about trying to deftly plumb the depths of death. -Nate Luce
Opening reception Saturday from 5-8 p.m.