A Slow Burn – Paintings by Dana Saulnier
April 29 – May 23, 2026
Dana Saulnier, Untitled 3325 (Menace), 2025, oil on canvas on panel, 36 x 45 inches
Closing Reception: Thursday, May 21, 2026, 6-8pm
Dana Saulnier’s lush oil paintings evoke the ‘figure in landscape’ which remains a nominal subject in the work. Pressure and change are omnipresent. Embodied forms, suspended in failing light, pivot and twist, rise and fall, yet mostly hold together. The visual configurations enact fundamental tensions that are always with us, but, given our contemporary collective tragedies we may find the work particularly potent.
There are meetings and encounters in these images, but they are multiple and difficult to describe. There are encounters with art. Gestural abstraction traverses a now distant spiritual ethos we may imagine in renaissance and baroque art. But the works would not exist if they did not speak to a life shared. The emotional tensions bear witness to our here and now.
Drawing as a search is central to the aesthetic. Drawing surrounds the paintings, before, during, and after. The paintings compress while the drawings divide, each with its own speed, birthing new potentials. A slow burn, the images never quite find peace, but perhaps they demonstrate a restlessness that makes sense for us.
‘A Slow Burn’ is Dana Saulnier’s seventh solo exhibition at First Street Gallery. Saulnier has exhibited his work in more than thirty solo shows, and numerous group exhibitions both in the United States and Europe.
See more of Dana Saulnier’s work and projects at www.danasaulnier.com and occasionally on Instagram.
