Eliot Greenwald's paintings portray cars gliding through a variety of landscapes, from nondescript valleys to dense jungles. By depicting cars on ever-changing terrains, Greenwald is able to explore the individual experience and the distances between subjective reality and an external world defined by continual reorganization. The cars in Greenwald's paintings act as a symbol for the viewer's mind, evoking the interior of one's psyche. Through the use of repetitive motifs and images, Greenwald constructs a sense of continuity between his works, mirroring the slow evolution of one's cognitive understanding of reality. By presenting these motifs and images in new contexts and with varying degrees of abstraction, Greenwald invites the viewer to consider the multifaceted nature of reality and how inescapable change is over time. Greenwald's paintings are often surreal and Dada-esque in their proportion, shape, and color. He accomplishes this by creating his own irregularly shaped canvases and employing impasto techniques and oil sticks with vibrant hues of pinks, blues, greens and yellows. His works are not meant to be realistic renderings but rather serve as studies on how we make sense of our place in the world. They are a reflection on the individual understanding of objects and their representation. In this way, his paintings offer a unique, alternative perspective on the world around us.
For snow show, Greenwald has created twelve paintings that transport the viewer into a world of snowy landscapes and quiet stillness. These works explore the sound, or absence of, that occurs during a snowstorm, encapsulating the quiet stillness that falls over the world during that brief time. The sunlit skylines radiate color as the snowstorm falls through the scenes marking the transition between the luminous and diffused spectral quality that a cloudy sky creates. The repeating valleys and cars in the soft, snowy worlds take on a meditative quality when viewed cumulatively. The silence of these otherworldly locations has the viewer approach them delicately, with care, just as one would navigate driving on freshly snowed roads. The organically shaped canvases act as a portal drawing you into their worlds and dimensions.
Through his use of repetitive motifs and images, Greenwald creates a sense of continuity between his works that mirrors the slow evolution of our understanding of reality. snow show invites the viewer to become enrobed in a tender tundra and absorb themselves in the dreamlike world.
