Stephen Maine's Residue Paintings at Five Points Gallery Showcase Printing Technique Innovations

Stephen Maine's Residue paintings, a series initiated in 2014, were displayed at Five Points Gallery in Torrington, Connecticut from November 16 to December 29, 2018. The exhibition featured five large-scale canvases, each measuring 100 x 80 inches, installed in a window-wrapped corner storefront. Maine employs a unique printing method using Styrofoam plates instead of brushes, which he describes as an indirect and intentionally imprecise production technique. This approach yields surprising visual outcomes while exploring color, surface, scale, seriality, and perception. The paintings exhibit luminous crackles of oppositional colors, with shifting translucency and opacity revealed under the gallery's indirect light. Works like P18-1001 feature a single printing of taxicab yellow over a baby blue ground, while P18-0714 combines misregistered printings of green, yellow, and pink over an orange base. P18-0724 presents subdued orange over a bluish-green ground with pockets of purple, pink, and violet. Maine's method avoids the slick seamlessness of pseudo-minimalist paintings, cultivating what he terms "calculated crappiness." The artist's background includes years of publishing lucid criticism, and his work references but diverges from influences like Cy Twombly and Lucio Fontana. The Residue paintings resist symmetry, representation, and symbolic language, instead functioning as extrovert dynamos of color and surface.