Secrets and Mountains: Carlo D'Anselmi

Carlo D'Anselmi (b. 1991, New York) lives and works in Ridgewood, Queens. His paintings emerge from imagination, bringing together figures, animals and landscapes in dreamlike compositions shaped by color, textured surfaces and a quietly emotive atmosphere. His practice explores memory, light, nature and the shifting boundary between reality and fiction. 

This exhibition, titled Secrets and Mountains, reflects on painting as a silent language, one that reveals itself gradually through attention, light, and time, where meaning remains open, unstable, and shaped by perception. In contrast, mountains assert themselves through scale and presence, constantly shifting, challenging fixed notions of space and proportion, and confronting the viewer with their immensity. 

During his first stay in Switzerland, overlooking the French Alps, D'Anselmi developed this body of work in a period of quiet observation, exploring his surrounding environment and watching the world change from Winter into Spring. Removed from the pace of New York, he absorbed this new environment, allowing its rhythms and transformations to shape his imagery. As time moved on, this mountainous and dynamic environment was absorbed, the forms softened, and D'Anselmi created new images containing secrets of their own. Each painting has a history, a drama, and a secret, taking a small piece from the beautiful Swiss terrain and giving it back something else. 

Trees will grow at odd angles, birds will fly out suddenly into the vast expanse. To be on a mountain is to breathe a thinner atmosphere, walk an uneven terrain. As an artist it is a profound encounter with the abstract idea of scale. These paintings exist in the space between Secrets and Mountains.

Exhibition on view until June 27th.