Sally Bruno piles on the paint in her solo debut at LAM Gallery. So thickly layered is the paint and so visually tactile are the surfaces that her 14 recent works might almost be called relief sculptures.
Still lifes, birds, domestic interiors and gardens are Bruno’s most common subjects, and the inescapable pleasures of a self-made home are their shared motif. Formally, the color-drenched paintings derive from artists like Henri Matisse and David Hockney. Technically they owe a debt to artists for whom colored paint is a lush material substance to be relished in its own right, such as the early work of Joan Brown and more recent examples by Michael Reafsnyder.