Cris Worley Fine Arts is pleased to announce the upcoming exhibition of Steven Charles, This is my uniform. The exhibition will open with an artist’s reception on Saturday, February 18th, from 5-8 pm, and will run through March 25th. The event is free and open to the public.

This is the artist’s fourth solo exhibition with the gallery. Steven Charles’s exuberant paintings create a wash, a saturation, a full immersion in color. Animated by a richly nuanced palette of pinks, reds, and lavenders—at times shot through with acid yellows and teals—his current body of work shifts focus: color takes the fore in the dialogue between composition and chromatic signature.

White is an accent, illuminating the compositions and opening and extending space. Some canvases look like the whorls of calligraphy; others are akin to tessellations. He works up the surface through painting and glazing. The gestures made with larger brushes than in previous work underscore a desire for efficiency and immediacy of movement. This yields singularly unrestrained canvases, some portions of which the artist leaves raw, with expressionistic fringes of drips. Absent a horizon-line, the layering blends past, present, and possible future in a fugue of temporality. Indeed, the work presents a temporal paradox: a process that offers an impression of spontaneity is an exercise in slowness, painstaking accumulation, and labyrinthine, Byzantine complexity. The result is exquisitely energetic.

Steven Charles was born in Birkenhead, England and grew up in Bedford, Texas. He received an MFA from The Tyler School of Art (1996) and BFA from the University of North Texas (1994). Charles received a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant and an Artist’s fellowship from the New York Foundation for the Arts. He has shown nationally and internationally. His work has been reviewed in publications such as Art in America, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and Vice. Charles’ work can be found in private and public collections across the country, including Capital One, Dallas, TX; West Collection, SEI; Corporate Campus, Oaks, PA; The Philip Morris Collection, Washington D.C.; Jerry I. Speyer and KG. Farley Collection, New York, NY, and UT Southwestern, Dallas, TX.