Competitive Landscapes

In Competitive Landscapes, Sally Curcio presents a series of oil paintings and drawings based on a variety sports fields, courts and martial arts surfaces.   

Curcio reveals that these arenas resemble abstract art, abstract expressionism, and minimalism. These areas easily translate into monochrome canvases, square paintings, and geometric shapes that bring to mind the visual language of work by artists like Joseph Albers, Kenneth Noland, Mark Rothko, Frank Stella, Piet Mondrian among others.

Curcio pushes her investigation of games through her imagery that juxtaposes hard edge boundary lines with atmospheric backgrounds. The canvases fade from light to dark giving an expansive feeling. The bounded images suggest literally and figuratively being in the zone alluding to the deep involvement in a game when an athlete experiences the egoless state of the flow.  Thus we are reminded that transcendence from the tedium of otherness and ego can manifest in an epiphany of oneness within the confines of a game.