Never No Treasure presents new paintings by Erica Newton done in oil on plaster, canvas and paper, showcasing works that begin in an active experimentation with these surfaces. As she paints both en plein air and from the studio, Newton looks to the natural world for her palettes and geometry, using landscape as a ground for both direct representation and abstraction. Rigorous and playful, her process exploits the malleability of material and subject until a piece reaches ‘clarity of sensation and spatial orientation’. Through this compositional problem solving, Newton’s paintings explore the murkiness of material awareness and of relationality between self, world and the work.

When painting en plein air, Newton uses torn sheets of acrylic-washed paper to interpret scenes ranging from the Mendocino Coast of Northern California to the lake in Prospect Park,Brooklyn. In the studio, plaster doubles as surface and material as she manipulates the plaster at different stages of the process to create work informed by both deliberation and serendipity. In ‘Untitled Landscape 2’, for instance, finger-drawn contours become the loose boundaries for an abstracted landscape, in which the sky is as terraformed as the ground, while in ‘Pile Up’, the plaster retains a swatch of burlap and pieces of ceramic, blurring the line between painting and sculpture.

Newton’s collaboration with her materials shows a preoccupation with memory and the palpable but often ineffable nature of dreams and fantasy; she paints in a way that tunes the viewer’s senses toward the familiar yet still unknown. With a curiosity for the generative potential of painting and its limits, Newton’s compositions come to be through a concentrated relationality between materials and ways of knowing, engaging in this process to see what gets born, what is communicated along the way and what remains just out of reach.

Near Crocket, 2023 Oil on plaster 6 x 6 in.

Erica Newton (b. 1991 Berkeley, CA) lives and paints in Brooklyn, NY. Outside of the studio, she travels to paint on site in different landscapes from upstate New York to Prospect Park, and her home landscape of Northern California. She received her MFA in painting from The New York Studio School in 2022. Newton will be attending the Skowhegan residency program in Maine this summer, 2024. Never No Treasure is Newton’s debut solo show, on view at Entrance through June 29, 2024.