From the Studio: Mel Prest

Color Chords

Mel Prest
May 10th - June 14th, 2025

Galleri Urbane is pleased to announce ‘Color Chords’ a solo exhibition by San Francisco artist Mel Prest. The artist returns for her fourth solo exhibition at Galleri Urbane in gallery two. Meet the artist from 5:00 - 7:00pm on May 10th.

An essay accompanies the solo exhibition:

"I believe it was John Cage who once told me, 'When you start working, everybody is in your studio – the past, your friends, enemies, the art world, and above all your own ideas – all are there. But as you continue painting, they start leaving, one by one, and you are left completely alone. Then, if you're lucky, even you leave'" – Painter Philip Guston (Conversation with Harold Rosenberg, 1974)

In her fourth solo exhibition, Mel Prest’s latest work in Color Chords reverberates rhythms of deep blues, purples, and lilac hues. Inspired by the ‘blue note’ oft employed in Jazz and Blues, the semi-discordant tonal affairs of color create unexpected harmonies that reveal the subtle structure of her reality. The latticework – painted lines as layered brushstrokes – is built upon one another revealing shifting planes of perspective and color. Prest builds three colors atop each other, blending notes into chords of color that optically create more than their single componants. " My color works like major and minor keys played together: sustaining, reverberating, and changing over time," says Prest.

She is careful to note that these lines aren't perfect, “Overtime things develop, you can see it in handwoven work and also in mine,” says Prest. “You can see a brush reload, or maybe my wrist jitters, or lines get closer or further apart; the waves of time working.” As humans, we search for structure; natural patterns revealing subsurface design, mathematical principles, harmony between subatomic elements of our reality. Physical and conceptual revelations construct how we perceive the structure of everyday life.

“I think of time as like a wheel, things repeat and things come back. Some of the structure of these squares is a circle in that way,” says Prest. This platonic essence came to Mel following her MFA at Mills College in Oakland, peeling away external influences; “I took away the big brushstrokes that weren't mine; I had all the 80’s people in my mind when I was in RISD. It was interesting to distill down that it was color and a lack of brushstroke, which is where the line came in,” says Prest.

These elements meld in Color Chords. The line, structure, and color made prevalent in her oeuvre are explored further - with these paintings specifically referencing the harmonious rhythms that pervade her practice. Lived experience finds a new language - non-verbal but experiential. Her paintings manifest as people, places, flowers, trees, seascapes - entrenched memories from life. “Sometimes there are people who are now attached to the paintings. It's much more esoteric, it doesn’t look like my friends but it feels like my friends,” says Prest. The paintings act as a visual manifestation of the rhythms of life; thrumming through the everyday, waiting for one to hear their music. As Prest says when describing this feeling, "For me it's this thing, 'Don't you hear it?'"