[2nd floor projects] is an excellent artist-run space in the Mission, open only on Sunday afternoons so perfect for a post-Papalote-brunch visit. Their current show is Bruno Fazzolari's The Lost Paintings, subtitled as explanation, "Fifteen small untitled paintings made sometime between 2001 and 2004—boxed, set aside undocumented, and inadvertently forgotten." They are abstract works with a primary color palette of matte brown and grey; the bright yellow of the piece pictured here is an unexpected punctuation mark, as is the pink in another painting. I briefly scanned Kevin Killian's lovely accompanying chapbook while I was in the gallery, and I think this is the very painting that reminded him of T.S. Eliot: "Some say the world will end in fire..." Fazzolari's paintings are joined by three of his sculptures that meld hyper-realism with the surreal. In one what looks like raw meat pours through a crack in a free-standing wall, while in another an electrical outlet that is just a little bit larger than it should be plays serious tricks on the eye. I didn't even see it at first, and then I did, a similar experience I had to the evocative forms in his paintings that shifted in and out of my perception as I concentrated on them. Subtle and brilliant.
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