Fruit Theater

Press Release

Nicelle Beauchene Gallery is pleased to present Fruit Theater, a solo exhibition by Silas Borsos. This is the artist’s first major exhibition with the gallery.

Silas Borsos responds to life through a painting process that is impressionistic, serial, and studied. Most often at a small scale, the artist makes oil on linen paintings with a restrained, humble palette and deft brushwork. In Fruit Theater, the artist turns his eye to compositions of fruit, engaging the long shadow of the still life genre and its inherent allegories. Limes, pears, and cherries cavort with melons, grapes, a pomegranate; a mound of blueberries dwarfs a row of plums. As though directing actors on a stage, Borsos composes his fruit in myriad arrangements, eliciting a certain anthropomorphism as associations are formed. The resulting mise-en-scène inflects the subject matter—and the still life genre overall—with both reverence and wit, insisting on the pure sweetness of painting.

Some paintings in the exhibition, such as Vine and Limes and Pear Quartet, feature the defined horizon of a table’s edge, situating the fruit subjects in a muted domestic space. In others, like Dream Sequence and Ancient Fruit, the composed fruit dance in fields of soft color, the artist’s brushwork clear and swirling. Looking to celebrated still life masters from Chardin, Cézanne, and Morandi to earlier examples of fresco paintings in Pompeii, Borsos acknowledges the abundant symbolism, and plasticity in meaning, of fruit through time. At hand are objects brimming with equal measures of vitality and imminent decay.

The artist’s own approach to this vibrant matter is loose yet exacting, playful and curious. With subtle shifts in temperature and plane, Borsos quiets and slows the passage of time: an abstraction of marks coalescing into an image of the precious, impermanent things at hand.

Silas Borsos (b. 1989, Toronto, Canada) lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. He received his MFA from the New York Studio School of Drawing, Painting, and Sculpture in 2020. He has been included in solo and group exhibitions at Nicelle Beauchene Gallery, New York; Steven Harvey Fine Arts Projects, New York (with Beaux Mendes); and Pamela Salisbury Gallery, Hudson. He is a 2023 recipient of the Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation Grant.