Douglas Melini 2025 by Miles McEnery Gallery

DOUGLAS MELINI

UNDER YOUR SKIN AND OVER THE MOON

DEEP SURFACE

Dan Cameron

Most of us retain at least a partial recollection of our sensorial excitement the first time we experienced photography at a microscopic scale, most likely in middle-school science class. The visceral thrill marked the youthful realization that a dust mote, the surface of a leaf, or a grasshopper’s mandible each contained within them an entire world, with a rich palette and spatial complexity that could rival any desert or mountain range. Not only were we infinitesimally tiny flecks in the grand scale of the universe, but we were also lumbering giants, unable to fully grasp entire worlds existing inside the tiny flecks all around us, just beyond the threshold of our unaided human eyes.

Many of us have later found that opportunities to be swept away by nature’s sublimity are not as frequent an element of our lives as we might wish. So it’s no wonder that a formational moment of wonder and awe, when technology lets us see what the naked eye can’t conjure, is often tucked away with our favorite childhood memories.

This unanticipated discovery of the limits of our capacity to perceive the physical world comes to mind when Douglas Melini’s recent paintings are viewed. They generate a precisely modulated visual ambiguity that makes it all but impossible to achieve a full understanding of what we’re looking at by just standing in one place. Typically, the full view comes first: We stand back at a respectful distance to admire the composition and distribution of color. But there inevitably comes a moment when the image doesn’t fully align with its graphic outline, and we move in for a closer inspection. At that point, the originality of Melini’s enterprise becomes more apparent.

His work stands out for his use of stippling to create elaborately raised textures that defy the eye’s effort to flatten the surface into a consistently modeled plane. The raised textures also keep the borders between colors from being sharply delineated. The finished surface is created through the repeated application of countless thin layers. The surface at first reinforces, then subtly contradicts, any first impression that the outer layer of the raised textures is the natural extension of the paintings’ original subjects.

Until recently, Melini’s paintings tended to be characterized by geometrical compositions set off by a central square. There was particular emphasis on frames that subdivided the compositions into adjacent but discrete compartments, each with a distinct chromatic and textural identity. Melini worked with pieces of reclaimed wood that he used for both support and surface. The wood’s physical weight and materiality relayed a sculptural presence, and Melini was inspired by its inherent grain patterns and used paint to further heighten them.

He never concealed his underlying commitment to evoke nature in his paintings. In practice, the geometric compositions served as an element of mediation that let us experience them as proxies for the experience of nature, but not necessarily as its aesthetic equivalent.

In this sense, the painting Crystalline Pendentives, 2024, which was shown in late 2024 at this gallery, represents a significant rupture with Melini’s previous work. There is no geometry, there is no wood grain, and there are no conspicuous frames. Instead, interwoven biomorphic forms completely fill the composition in a continually unfolding network that resembles arteries, veins, and capillaries. Although each form is clearly distinguished by shape and color, the extreme impasto Melini has patiently built up through months of adding new layers and letting them dry, causes the edges between shapes to blur and become indistinct. The closer we move in to examine the painting’s surface, the more the divisions between distinct forms start to break down, as if they were chalk scrawled on asphalt rather than oil paint meticulously applied to stretched linen. Like Georges Seurat’s pointillism, the illusion of any clear designation between individual image snaps into position as soon as we take a step backward to get the full picture.

Georges Seurat, A Sunday on La Grande Jatte, 1884, Oil on canvas, 81 3/4 x 121 1/4 inches (207.5 x 308.1 cm)

Claude Monet, Water Lillies, 1919, Oil on canvas, 39 3/4 x 78 2/3 inches (101 x 200 cm)

The seductions of pictorial surfaces whose textures approximate the consistency of dried lava have been a minor but continuous thread running throughout the previous century and a half of painting history. In the wake of Vincent van Gogh and Claude Monet came Georges Rouault, Emil Nolde, Oskar Kokoschka, and Jean Dubuffet, among others in the first half of the twentieth century, to build up thick impastos. Soon, Jackson Pollock’s accumulated skeins of dried enamel established new possibilities for dense thickets of paint that shifted the medium’s physicality away from easel painting and toward sculpture. A bit closer to our time, artists like the French painter Claude Leroy (1900–2000) and the San Francisco artist Jay DeFeo (1929–1989) embraced radically overburdened surfaces for the purpose of experimentation. And for contemporary painters like Peter Halley and Julian Schnabel, encrusted accumulations of paint have become a synthetic language of their own. (Rules governing the guardrails of irony in postmodernist theory and practice have made the imposing physical presence of accumulated paint somewhat less emphatic.)

Melini’s recent paintings diverge from most of these examples in one significant way: his hard-won expertise at creating intense visual engagement by using intermittent patches of unevenly applied color. Two paintings in progress seen during a recent studio visit were, like the others, based on extreme close-up photographs of natural surfaces and textures that the artist encountered online, and then cropped or otherwise modified until he arrived at an image that he wanted. In As If In Space (2024), a deep black provides the ground for what appears to be a fast-growing lichen colony coming together in a lime-green central ridge, then falling away on both sides to a deep forest green, dotted by pulsing blue-white nodules. With The Whole of the Soul (2025), we face a catacomb-like facade of orange cell-like shapes opening into deep, receding holes, whose outer crusts are pocked by rivulets of green and black. As in Crystalline Pendentives, minute inspections of the paintings’

Jackson Pollock, Number 1, 1950 (Lavender Mist), 1950, Oil, enamel, and aluminum on canvas, 87 x 118 inches (221 x 299.7 cm)

Jay DeFeo, The Rose, 1958-1966, Oil on canvas, 128 7/8 x 92 1/4 x 11 inches (327.3 x 234.3 x 27.9 cm)

Peter Halley, False Front, 2024, Acrylic, fluorescent acrylic, Flashe, and Roll-a-Tex on canvas, 76 1/2 x 66 1/2 inches (194.31 x 168.91 cm)

surfaces reveal that what looks from a distance to be as sharply defined as a photographic image is not. Individual lines quiver, edges vibrate, and once-solid forms begin to oscillate between crystal clarity and rough approximation.

In freeing himself from the limits of frames, grids, and other familiar types of compositional order, Melini is now attempting something that in many ways is more challenging and elusive. One way to think about his goal is by imagining what happens when we magnify a photograph of a tiny fragment of nature. When we try to achieve resolution of the image past a certain degree of magnification, the contrast between the image and its surroundings starts to dissolve. If we then consider how in recent decades we have accustomed ourselves to visually decoding the ways that color pixels, which we might imagine as digital proxies for microscopic particles, produce similar margins of retinal indeterminacy, we can begin to appreciate how Melini’s technique acts to insert a type of visual buffer between ourselves and the level of visual verisimilitude that would result if there were crisp details and tidy edges all the way down to a subatomic level.

Perhaps the paradox can be described as a form of tension between the active idealizing/editing part of visual experience that happens whenever our mind’s eye rushes in to tidily rearrange the blurry image into a state of visual coherence, and our overarching awareness that this same effort to try to bring the image into focus only underscores how blunt our own perceptual apparatus really is. Douglas Melini offers a way of perceiving natural form and beauty that enables us to remain attuned to our perceptual shortcuts, while sidestepping some of the hubris underlying any presumption that nature begins and ends at the limits of our own sensorial understanding.

Dan Cameron is a New York-based curator, writer, archivist, and visual artist.