Night Gallery is pleased to present Peace Fellow, an exhibition of new paintings by Los Angeles-based artist Ross Caliendo. This will be the artist's first solo exhibition at the gallery following his inclusion in the group exhibition Shrubs, 2022 and our 2025 Frieze Los Angeles presentation.

Peace Fellow is a show of landscape paintings, a conventional genre that Caliendo uses as a foil to explore concepts of visual perception and optics. Throughout this work there are notes of Americana-kitsch (a bald eagle, palm trees, etc.) which are deployed to give the viewer a false sense of security for experiencing genuinely radical paintings. 

At first glance, the canvases in Peace Fellow depict familiar scenes: a grove of birch trees on a wind-swept bluff, a row of palm trees basking in the glow of sunset, and a sun-dappled path in an old-growth forest. The longer you look (and the closer you get), these familiar images begin to disintegrate and collapse in on themselves, giving way to patterns, scrapes, impasto dots, swipes, and washes - a micro-universe of colors. This cacophony of gestures would individually be described as impressionistic; collectively, they illustrate the rigor of our cones, rods, and optic nerves as they shape and order our seen reality.

The largest painting in this show, Forest, stretches across three large canvases, with a camouflaged great grey owl flanked on either side by outstretched branches. Aptly known as the spectral owl or phantom of the north, this bird haunts its viewers' periphery, darting in and out of the line of sight before sneaking back into its habitat and/or monochrome ground. While this owl does serve as a greater totem for this exhibition, the subject of Forest (and perhaps all the works here) is the illusion. By depicting the phenomena of flawless, natural camouflage achieved through centuries of evolution, Caliendo draws our attention to the illusory nature of painting and invites us to revel in its trickery. 

Caliendo’s work has been exhibited internationally and domestically at venues including Anthony Gallery (Chicago, IL), Fores Project (London, UK), Loyal Gallery (Stockholm, SE), Pace Prints (New York, NY), Asia Art Center (Taipei, Taiwan), Hunter Dunbar Projects (New York, NY), and The K11 Musea (Hong Kong, China), among others. In 2022, the artist held his first institutional solo exhibition in Asia, entitled "Realm", at the CVG Foundation, (Beijing, China). Caliendo received his BFA from the Columbus College of Art and Design (Columbus, OH), in 2011. He has been living and working in Los Angeles, CA since.