ARTIST STATEMENT
My paintings exist between artifact and event—surfaces that hold the memory of their making and invite slow, careful looking. Each one is a record of layered moments: paint is applied, obscured, and revised until it becomes not just something to look at, but something to look into.
Many recent works feature a vessel-like form that serves as a container for marks, colors, lines, and fragments of text. This form can be read as a jar, a shield, a portal—at once enclosing and opening - it gathers information while also suggesting passage, as though viewers might step through the image into another space.
The surfaces themselves are crucial to the making and understanding of my work. The paint does not sit on top but is pressed and worked into the ground so that it appears embedded, as though it belongs to the surface rather than resting upon it. This gives the paintings a tactile, almost archaeological quality, recalling weathered stone, ancient walls, corrupted scans, or the flatness of a screen.
Up close, viewers find scratches, ghosted fragments, and carved lines that reveal the intimacy of the process. From afar, these details dissolve into compositions that flicker between coherence and collapse. The result is a shifting experience where image and material press against one another and the paintings offer not just images but conditions for perception. They ask viewers to slow down, to inhabit uncertainty, and to engage with the instability of seeing itself—where illusion meets material, and where each canvas becomes a container for memory, time, and the possibility of transformation.
BIO
Born 1977 in Wareham, MA.
In 1999 Riley received BFA in Painting from the Massachusetts College of Art and Design. In 2004 he received an MFA in Sculpture from the University of Pennsylvania.
His work has been shown in solo and group exhibitions throughout the Northeast including; Hillyer Gallery in DC, Danese/Corey in New York City, TSA NY in Brooklyn, NY, Gallery 263 in Cambridge, MA, Lamont Gallery in Exeter, NH, Arthur Ross Gallery in Philadelphia, PA, The Arts Center of the Capital Region in Troy, NY, and several others.
He has received grants from the Joan Mitchell Foundation, The Rhode Island State Council on the Arts, and the Berkshire Taconic Foundation. Riley has been an artist in residence at the Joan Mitchell Center, Yaddo, and the Vermont Studio Center.
Riley currently lives and works in Washington DC and maintains a studio in Colle di Tora, in Italy's Turano Valley.