Marisa Regante, Unspoken Pleasures of the New Frontier

Marisa Regante
Unspoken Pleasures of the New Frontier
May 10 - June 14, 2025

Opening Reception: Saturday, May 10th, 2-5 pm

Lowell Ryan Projects is pleased to present Unspoken Pleasures of the New Frontier, the first solo exhibition by New Jersey-based, self-taught artist Marisa Regante (1980). In this suite of nine small-scale intricate oil paintings, Regante interlaces surrealism, personal symbolism, and retro Americana into rich, cinematic tableaux. Sourcing imagery from vintage magazines such as National Geographic, Playboy, and Arizona Highways, she reconfigures fragments of the past into dreamlike scenes that examine rituals of domesticity, desire, and escapism. Equal parts reverie and social mirror, these works traverse a world both intimate and uncanny.

Regante develops her compositions through analog collage—cutting and reassembling visual ephemera until a composition intuitively takes shape. From these paper fragments, she builds each oil painting layer by layer, rendering her subjects with a quiet precision that balances the surreal with the sincere. In Tupperwave Abode, a 1950s Tupperware party unfolds in a floral-drenched living room, overseen by a giant cuttlefish, transforming a scene of domestic ritual into something mythic and absurd. In Once Twice Three Times a Lady, Regante reimagines imagery from a 1970s porn film, creating a layered portrayal of pleasure, detachment, and repetition. A moment of sexual intimacy becomes fragmented—arms elongate, bodies echo, slipping into abstraction. Through her “fragmenting” technique, she evokes motion, time distortion, and the glitch-like duplicity of pornographic fantasy.

The title Unspoken Pleasures of the New Frontier suggests a psychological and symbolic terrain: a place where the past is not merely remembered but reimagined. Nature appears throughout the exhibition not as a passive backdrop but as a living, transformative presence. Mountain ranges, fields of flowers, and forest interiors hint at spaces of personal renewal, echoing the artist’s relationship to the natural world. Though Regante’s compositions are filled with depictions of the past, her treatment of them is neither ironic nor sentimental. Instead, she positions these elements within new, layered mythologies—ones that speak to longing and the strange beauty of reinvention.

What makes Regante’s work especially compelling is her ability to create resonance through contrast—between the meticulous and the intuitive, the fantastical and the mundane. With no formal training, she approaches painting as both a craft and a form of visual poetics, allowing instinct and emotion to lead. Her debut exhibition introduces a singular voice: one that transforms the residue of another era into a quietly radical, self-authored world.