Where the Self Begins to Move: A Review of Gesture, Perception, Identity
- Art Dealer Street
- 2 days ago
- 4 min read
A Three-Part Conversation in Paint
Alessandro Berni Gallery’s group exhibition Gesture, Perception, Identity brings together Denise Jones Adler, Lauralee Franco, and Eva March in a dialogue that feels both intimate and expansive. On view from June 4 through June 14, 2026, at 511 West 25th Street in New York, the exhibition does not treat painting as a fixed image or simple act of representation. Instead, it presents painting as a living process: a place where memory, emotion, instinct, and selfhood continuously shift.
The title itself gives the viewer a key to enter the exhibition. Gesture becomes the first language. Perception becomes the unstable lens. Identity becomes the question rather than the answer. Across the works of Adler, Franco, and March, the canvas becomes a site of searching, where the visible world is only the beginning and the inner world slowly rises to the surface.
Denise Jones Adler: Memory, Myth, and the Fragmented Self
Denise Jones Adler’s work opens a dreamlike space where personal history, mythology, collage, and symbolic imagery meet. Her paintings and mixed-media works carry the feeling of something remembered, but not fully recovered. They are not clean narratives. They are layered, interrupted, and emotionally charged.
Adler assembles discarded materials, photographs, newspapers, advertisements, and other fragments from daily life, transforming them into surreal landscapes that move between the physical and the spiritual. In this sense, her work feels like an archive of the self, but one that refuses to stay organized. A figure, a landscape, a symbolic form, or a mythic reference may appear, but it is always surrounded by traces of another time, another story, another emotional register.
Works such as Gaia, The Conjuror, Myth of the Flower Goddess, and I Note the Passing of Time suggest a world where identity is shaped through accumulation. Adler’s practice gives the exhibition one of its strongest psychological anchors: the idea that the self is not a single image, but a collage of memory, inheritance, loss, imagination, and belief.
Lauralee Franco: The Force of Gesture
If Adler’s work moves through memory and myth, Lauralee Franco’s paintings arrive with the force of motion. Franco is deeply engaged with the language of painting itself: the mark, the body, the pressure of the hand, the emotional charge of scale. Her works do not simply refer to Abstract Expressionism; they wrestle with its energy and reshape it into something personal.
Her paintings carry a strong physical presence. Large canvases such as Lady Rider, The Serpent, The Highway at Night, and Orange Sun use oil paint, charcoal, and pencil on linen to create fields of tension. Marks collide, forms appear and disappear, color pushes against structure, and the surface becomes a record of movement.
What makes Franco’s work compelling is that the gesture never feels decorative. It feels lived. Her paintings hold rhythm, memory, family history, urban energy, and private reflection. The brushwork can feel restless, but it is never empty. It carries the weight of someone thinking through paint, trusting the canvas to hold what language cannot fully explain.
Eva March: Color as Energy and Inner Vision
Eva March brings a different kind of intensity to the exhibition. Her work is rooted in color, instinct, and spiritual energy. Beginning as a self-taught artist and later studying at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, March developed a visual language that moves between figuration and abstraction. Her paintings are vivid, sensory, and alive with chromatic force.
For March, color is not just a formal choice. It is emotional, spiritual, and energetic. In works such as CACTUS 1, CACTUS 2, PRANA 1, and LA CLAIRVOYANCE, color seems to vibrate from within the canvas. Forms emerge through movement rather than strict composition, creating a feeling of surrender and discovery.
Her practice adds a strong sense of vitality to the exhibition. Where Adler explores the layered space between memory and myth, and Franco emphasizes the physical force of the mark, March turns painting into a field of energy. Her works suggest that perception is not only visual, but bodily and emotional. The viewer does not simply look at the painting; they feel pulled into its atmosphere.
The Exhibition as an Unstable Mirror
Together, Adler, Franco, and March create a strong and layered exhibition because their practices do not compete with one another. They expand the meaning of the title from three different directions.
Adler approaches identity through fragments, symbols, and personal mythology. Franco approaches it through movement, scale, and the urgency of the painted mark. March approaches it through color, spirituality, and the unconscious. Each artist offers a different answer to the same question: how does painting reveal what is hidden beneath the surface?
The strength of Gesture, Perception, Identity lies in its refusal to define identity as something complete. Instead, it presents identity as fluid, emotional, fractured, and constantly becoming. The exhibition reminds us that perception is never neutral. We see through memory, through feeling, through the body, through personal history, and through everything we cannot quite name.
A Living Field of Painting
At its core, Gesture, Perception, Identity is a celebration of painting as an active and unstable field. The works do not simply hang as finished objects. They feel like moments of arrival within a longer process of searching.
Through three distinct visual languages, Alessandro Berni Gallery presents an exhibition that is thoughtful, energetic, and emotionally resonant. It gives viewers space to move between dreamscape, gesture, and color; between the intimate and the cosmic; between what is seen and what is felt.
In the end, the exhibition proposes that identity is not something we possess once and for all. It is something we continuously assemble, lose, recover, and transform. In the hands of Adler, Franco, and March, painting becomes the mirror where that transformation begins.
Exhibition Information
Gesture, Perception, Identity Works by Denise Jones Adler, Lauralee Franco, & Eva March June 4 – June 14, 2026
Watch moments from the opening night here Alessandro Berni Gallery 511 West 25th Street, New York, NY
Opening Reception: Thursday, June 4, 6–9 PM Hours: Tuesday – Saturday, 11 AM – 6 PM Sunday: By appointment only
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