Etty Yaniv reviews an exhibition of works by Gili Levy, Katherine Bradford, and Todd Bienvenu at Valentine Gallery, Ridgewood, Queens, New York, on view through December 29, 2013.

Yaniv writes that “the three painters featured in the current show share a deep love of color, gesture, and an expressionistic gusto, resulting in unabashedly painterly canvases and works on paper… [Bienvenu] conveys the angst and bliss of our cyber-age, one in which the ideas of privacy, exposure, and pornography are increasingly blurred… Levy’s paintings escape a clear definition of subject matter or mood, so they remain oddly enigmatic yet deeply personal. She manages to translate such tensions into a cohesive painterly form without concealing how this form came to be, leaving on the surface traces of the match… each of Katherine Bradford’s small-scale canvases embraces a full universe. Mostly comprised of abstracted boats or occasional figures, Bradford’s canvases are both lush and reductive. Executed with brilliant color sensibility and grouped in a row, they activate the narrow corridor at Valentine with their luminous presence.”