Philip Martin Gallery is pleased to present Song, a solo exhibition of new paintings by Canadian-born, Athens, GA-based artist, Holly Coulis. Holly Coulis's new oil-on-linen works reveal basic truths about paintings, what it feels like to look at them, make them and be engaged in their magic.

For over twenty years, Holly Coulis has worked to distill a kind of essence in her work. Like Italian artist Giorgio Morandi, or Canadian painter David Milne, Coulis has built in her practice, which has drawn over the years on portraiture, landscape and still-life, a terminology of line, color, shape, touch and paint materiality that is not only visually thrilling, but also fundamentally evocative. Coulis invites the viewer into a conversation with the terms of the art object. What are the colors in her pictures doing? What does the line-work delineate? How does the touch of Coulis's brush, velvety in flat areas, stuttering at other moments into linear, looping vectors, build the motion and depth of pictorial space?

These questions are only answered in the viewer's own act of looking. Writing on Swiss master Paul Klee, British artist Bridget Riley notes, "Every painter starts with elements - lines, colors, forms - that are essentially abstract in relation to the pictorial experience that can be created with them.” Coulis comments, "I am starting to become most interested in the abstract elements, how the lines intersect and weave and the places that open up for color." She notes, "I create the language and then it feeds on itself... You find an answer, and then you find another problem.”

Holly Coulis's works enlist wit and precision, an openness to emotion, and an awareness of the particularities of one's personal vision. Holly Coulis situates the viewer in relation to their own personal experience. 21st-century individuals in a mass media globalized consumer society, we are at the same time in some sense always making our own way. Coulis's work hints at the energy of Japanese 70s Pop, for example, while also calling to mind the contemplative stillness of a work by Brice Marden. Isolation has long been considered a means by which to build interior clarity; engagement with others enables the communication on which we thrive. Through the one-on-one encounter at the heart of the art object, Holly Coulis invites looking and feeling, expressing, thinking and experiencing via a pictorial container of endless possibility.