Christine Lafuente: In Visibility
Gross McCleaf Gallery, 123 Leverington Ave, Philadelphia, PA, 19127
May 1 – 30, 2026
Gross McCleaf Gallery is delighted to present In Visibility, a solo exhibition of new paintings by Christine Lafuente. Known for her nuanced handling of oil color relationships and layered, reflective surfaces, Lafuente brings together still lifes, seascapes, and cityscapes in a body of work that explores how we see and remember.
The experience of looking is dynamic, with memory filling in gaps and fleeting details taking on a life of their own in the mind’s eye. Lafuente translates the fluidity of these perceptual conditions into paint, transcribing light and atmosphere through color to produce compositions that resolve these shifting conditions into their own visual truth.
It is a “harmonic resonance between light and color,” that determines each composition, as Lafuente describes. Her paintings are built through closely tuned color relationships, where variations of tone and saturation carry structure in place of fixed form. Rather than describing objects directly, she allows passages of color and movement of paint across the surface to construct space. “Painting is an expression of both a visual experience and a response to the qualities of oil paint,” she notes, emphasizing the material itself as an active participant in the image.
“I am drawn to views with a poetic relationship between human scale and far horizons,” Lafuente writes. Across this work, that sense of scale is not fixed but reconfigured through the language of still life. “The backgrounds and tabletops of still life painting allow me to recreate the atmospheres and architectures of places,” she explains, where “seascapes and cityscapes, suggested on an intimate scale,” are populated with flowers, fruit, and objects. These paintings do not describe a single location or reality, but instead conjure many places that live in Lafuente’s visual memory, where observation and imagination collapse into a unified image.
Lafuente’s paintings unfold gradually, shaped through duration and responsiveness rather than a predetermined image. “I spend time looking, mixing, I might do a drawing, I’m adjusting tones, I’m gathering materials,” she explains, “but mostly I am being with the thing I see for a long exposure and allowing it to reveal a composition.” In this way, each work emerges through sustained attention. The resulting compositions hold the experience of looking as subjects shift, settle, and come into focus.
An in-depth conversation with the artist, Art Sync | Being with the Thing I See: Conversation with Christine Lafuente, by Elizabeth Johnson (edited by Matthew Crain), is available on the gallery’s website.
About the Artist
Christine Lafuente is a still life and landscape oil painter, known for her alla prima (in one sitting) wet-into-wet technique focusing on the interplay of color and light. After her Bryn Mawr College degree, she completed the CFA program from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and earned her MFA at Brooklyn College. Her work has been exhibited in the U.S. and internationally and has been the subject of 35 solo shows and numerous group shows. Through the course of her career, she has been the recipient of many grants, awards, and artist residencies including the Philadelphia Sketch Club Medal for Achievement in Visual Arts and two full fellowships from the Vermont Studio Center. Based in Brooklyn, N.Y., Lafuente also teaches painting workshops, paints during summers in Maine, and has painted in residence in Old San Juan, Puerto Rico, and Venice, Italy.