Giampietro Reopens With A Splash

Fred Giampietro’s gallery has reopened in a new downtown spot with a splash — a splash of color, that is, in the large, turbulent acrylic paintings of Zachary Keeting.

Keeting’s ​“talkative” paintings — because he likens them to an ongoing and very animated family conversation — are the main attraction in ​“Rockless Volume,” the first show of the Fred Giampietro Gallery, running until Feb. 21 in his expansive, and expensive, high-gloss new digs on Chapel Street near High.

Moving the main sales and gallery location from its previous sites at Erector Square and then Orange Street into the former Pinkberry Yogurt spot was taking a big risk, Giampietro said on Saturday at a reception for the maiden exhibition.

In addition to the cost of renovating the 2,300 square-foot space and making it shine, Giampietro now has more monthly rent to pay. Giampietro said the amount is comparable to what he was shelling out when he ran a gallery in the highest-rent district of Madison Avenue in Manhattan, across from the Whitney Museum.

However, being across the street and around a few corners from the not-so-shabby Yale University art institutions is paying off, Giampietro reported. So far anyway.

Before an artists’ talk at the gallery on Saturday for the show that Keeting shares with sculptor Anahita Vossoughi and collagist Lorne Myhre, Giampietro termed the move thus far ​“fantastic.”

He said the new location is boosting his sales online as well as on the internet by 125 percent.

“You get an educated, art-loving group, often couples, and they can make decisions,” he added.

They can make decisions on the works in ​“Rockless Volume” until Feb. 21, when the show closes.

“Domesticating” the Space

During a wide-ranging and probing hour of talk, Keeting, Vossoughi, and Myhre shared their approaches and struggles with about 25 visitors, many of whom, by the acuity of their questions, appeared to be artists themselves.

Giampietro said he chose Keeting’s new paintings to inaugurate the space not only because, as a regular in the gallery’s stable of artists, his show was due, but also because he liked the bold, brash, attention-getting colors and contours of the artist’s new compositions. They amount to a kind of ​“grand opening” banner.

“Anahita really complements him,” Giampietro added.

Keeting’s previous show at Giampietro’s Erector Square location, where Keeting keeps a studio, was quite different. Giampietro said he was drawn to the new work because each painting feels to him much more distinctive.

“I’m handling the colors differently. I’m trying to allow the materials to move with intense naturalism,” Keeting explained.

That movement is achieved, in part, by his literally shaking his canvases, or coaxing the paint to move on its own. In ​“August (2)” (pictured), ​“that ghostly creep was a large puddle of color that overnight crept across the painting.”

Keeting broke his left hand around Christmas and that has put a big crimp in his shaking. Since the break and during recovery from a wrist operation two weeks ago he’s worked mainly on paper and on a far smaller scale.

“Fortunately, I’m a righty,” he said.

Keeting said that he’s seeking techniques to unleash more ​“conversation” among the works, and that he liked the way the paintings interacted with each other in the gleaming new space.

He described the sole tryptich in the show (pictured) as set up as ​“a couple with an interloper.” The other pictures along the walls of the gallery were ​“cafe scenes with multiple voices emerging, ideas coming into contact.”

Keeting said his role as a painter of these most recent works has been to ​“orchestrate personality zones in flux” through a new handling of the paint, the shapes, and the palette. He praised the new gallery space for the way it ​“domesticated” the paintings, that is, allowing the relationships in the paintings to flourish. He called the array of the new works ​“siblings with one mom and different fathers.”

Giampietro said that while the Orange Street location was too small, at Erector Square the paintings seemed to struggle to fill up the space. Chapel Street splits the difference.

Myhre said that much of his work, represented by small collages and two steel sculptures, has been inspired by ​“Forcing House,” a poem by Theodore Roethke that has horticultural images on top of one another, a bit like a word collage that evoked a kind of visual correlative as Myhre read the verses to his audience.

One questioner asked Myhre why he worked with newspaper as the first layer of his collage. His answer: ​“I’m intimidated by white ground on paper or canvas when I make art. If I already have something to react against, I can work with that.”

Vossoughi offered some similarly candid insights to her process. A painter turned sculptor, Vossoughi continues to like to scrape away on her surfaces, work and rework, and throw out no materials if she can help it. What was she looking for in her art?

“A look as if it made itself,” she replied.

No matter his gallery’s location, Giampietro always has represented artists like Vossoughi, who teaches at the Yale School of Art, as well as MFA students. It appears that the new location is only going to intensify the relationship.

“Rockless Volume” runs at the Giampietro Gallery at 1064 Chapel St. until Feb. 21. The next exhibition at Giampietro is called ​“Irregular Rendition.” It’s to be curated by Lucy Hunter, an art history PhD candidate at Yale University. The show opens on Feb. 24 and runs through March 14, coinciding with a conference on legal issues and art being convened at the Yale Law School. Giampietro is hosting one of the conference receptions at his new gallery.