Serenity Now

There are no listings for any of the beach houses pictured in Maureen Gallace’s exhibition, titled February 2024, at Gladstone Gallery. Like so much seaside property these days, the painter’s cottages are uniformly inaccessible to outsiders. They are indifferent to the desire they inspire. In their impenetrable consistency, these saltboxes remind us that a house is just a box with a triangle on top plus a window, a rectangle of the right size. Is there even an interior to see?

Gallace is neither an American realist nor a Sunday painter. She does not work en plein air. Instead, she makes quick impressions in graphite and then turns those studies into tight little New England pastorals that gnaw at the seams of their own pastiche. In February 2024, a shadowy neighborhood of Gallace’s drawings greeted you at the door. Past these empty homes, it was a straight shot down to the water, rendered in skillful swipes of oil paint. But even the presence of yellow roses could not convince me that her beaches aren’t stone-cold. That doesn’t mean I wouldn’t invest.