NEW YORK, NY.- An exhibition of two intriguingly independent bodies of work by James Little that reflect the artist’s single-mindedness with structure, form and color opened at the June Kelly Gallery on April 12. The exhibition, entitled Slants and White Paintings, will remain on view through May 15.

Little, ever, the meticulous craftsman, the ceaselessly attuned observer, says these works are indicative of further chapters of experiments that push the envelope with his ongoing idea based theories.

The body of work titled Slants reflects Little’s extended process when developing paintings as they are not totally conceived in advance but are, as he states, “intuitively worked out on canvas.” Little creates his own colors, with pigment and heated beeswax; then layers each multiple times within exactingly defined edges. Little’s exuberantly colorful work with paralleled bands, presented in earlier exhibitions as hardedge verticals and geometric chevron design, radically shift into diagonal constructs here in Slants (Democratic Experiment).

Little’s alternate body of work titled White Paintings, point toward an instantly recognizable shift the artist has made from his powerful pictorial almost architectural array of vertical, horizontal and diagonal elements to a less structured pictorial space, yet strongly abstract in feeling.

In White Paintings, Little’s deliberateness with defining edges of forms as in the work titled Slants is not as measured. In contrast, unreservedly shaped, colorful, non-specific figuration suggestive of near cellular-like cavities, against a ground of thickly applied white pigment, are perceived as almost airborne (Posse).

Both bodies of work overwhelm with intricacy of form and energy casting the sensory perception of the visual as yielding a magnitude of data with which the viewer must grapple.

Jim Harithas, director of Station Museum of Contemporary Art, Houston, Texas, made an earlier statement about Little’s paintings that is ever pertinent to this current body of work, and that is, “each work has multiple, implicit and potential meanings and sensations that are revealed by the act of simply looking at the paintings.”

Little lives and works in New York City. He holds a BFA degree from the Memphis Academy of Art and an MFA degree from Syracuse University. Little has participated in numerous one-person and group exhibitions throughout the United States and Europe. His paintings are represented in many museums, corporate and private collections, including the Newark Museum, the DeMenil Collection in Houston, Everson Museum of Art, Syracuse; New Jersey State Museum, Trenton; Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; Tennessee State Museum, Nashville; Arkansas Arts Center, Little Rock; Library of Congress, Washington, DC, Maatschappij Arti Et Amicitiae, Amsterdam, Holland, and Art in Embassies Program, N’Djamena Collection, Chad, Central Africa.

Little is currently working on a major commission from the Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA) for the new Brooklyn-bound platform at Jamaica Station. The platform serves those traveling between Jamaica, Queens, and Barclays Center in Brooklyn. Little’s design consists of 33 vertical windows, each 17 feet tall and 5 feet wide, and each with a multi-colored geometric pattern that he has created and that will be fabricated in Paderborn, Germany. The installation is expected to be completed in 2018.