About My Work

Storefronts, anonymous motels, lunch counters, empty chairs, vacant city streets, freeways and cars. Stark emptiness and overwhelming loneliness are what dominate my canvases. We've all been there, or caught it by a blink of an eye driving by. . . that sense of overall familiarity depicted in one suspended moment, like a single frame in a film, captured fragments of a memory that can only by relived in our minds.

The universality of my spaces comes not only from the commonplace objects and familiar scenes I choose to depict, but by way of that certain sense of atmosphere, that sharp strand of light which illuminates stillness. Bold light and shadow, rather than slavishly-rendered details, along with bright color and composition, create the distinctive, precise sense of place in my images.

Somebody said to me, "It's how a European sees American culture." By focusing on the essential simplicity of objects and scenery, I try to capture an integral facet of American culture that has dominated me all of my life, from cartoons to popart to photorealism.

Despite the use of photographs, the finish of my paintings is often quite loose and differs significantly from the smooth, virtually invisible brushwork that is characteristic of
sharpfocus photorealists. In my rendering I try to distillate, reducing many details. I bring the painting to a point at which it captures the essence of particular scene.

--Sergio Galli