Luckygirl Gallery is pleased to present Erase Traces, a solo exhibition of large-scale oil paintings by Portland artist Eric Rue, his first with the gallery.
Trained at PNCA and the Pratt Institute, where he earned his MFA with distinction, Rue has developed a practice that holds classical painting traditions in tension with the flattened, backlit logic of digital imagery. His oil paintings make that tension physical. Drawing on influences from the Dutch masters to Matisse, Picasso, and Post-Impressionism, his work arrives somewhere harder to name: monumental, a little destabilizing, and perhaps refreshingly non-conciliatory to current appetites.
Rue works from a warehouse studio at NW Marine Works, building paintings that are physically commanding and conceptually restless. The show boasts very large pieces, and that scale is not incidental, it is the point. Rue's canvases ask to be stood in front of, not just looked at. Their layered surfaces, shifting geometries, and compressed color carry the weight of process: he rotates and reworks each composition continuously, letting the painting find its shape through both making and plan.
By day, Rue works for the Jordan Schnitzer Family Foundation collection, in daily hand in glove relationship to some of the most significant contemporary art in circulation. It shows, not in imitation, but in a painter who knows what scale and surface can do, and chooses both with care.
