"Drift" Abstract Painting by Stephanie Massaux

Stephanie Massaux is a native New York City artist whose mixed media painting is based on elaborate, intuitive, and pictorial gestures. They incorporate a variety of textures, colors, and diverse layers, which alternate consecutive, conscious, deliberate, and unpredictable interventions. Her paintings develop intuitively, are visually organized, and appeal to the tactile dimension of perception.

The material of her paintings is obtained primarily by the use and subtle mixture of highly pigmented oil paint and cold wax medium. This mixture allows her paintings to evolve through complex processes of superimposition, using additive and subtractive techniques throughout their creation, and results in a textural, matte, color-saturated surface. The stable substrate supports her expressive mark-making and the diverse stratification. Massaux’s poetic palettes and innovative surface treatments often borrow from the beauty of aged surfaces, weathering, and abrasions left visible by the scouring of time.

Massaux studied fine art early on at the High School of Music an Art and continued her studies at Purchase College and the School of Visual Arts in New York. She earned her BFA in Restoration at F.I.T., New York. For nearly two decades, she professionally restored and conserved antique wooden objects, with a focus on fine antique gilded-wood picture frames. She completed two major conservation projects for the permanent collection at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City.

Stephanie Massaux draws inspiration from her conscious and unconscious mind, along with half a century of visual memories and emotions. The abstract space that emerges from her practice suggests reminiscences and deliberate quotations from American historical abstraction, which she revisits in the blurred, vacillating, and elusive light of our modernity.

A collection of her recent work is currently on exhibition at The Gallery at 200 LEX.