RJ Messineo: 4:00 Universe” a Morán Morán, Los Angeles

RJ Messineo, 4:00 Universe, 14 March – 30 May 2020, Morán Morán, Los Angeles, USA

Every day, at four in the afternoon, something fractures. It’s a suspended hour, almost capricious: too late for full daylight, too early for nightfall. That’s when the light bends, orange, pink, and the world outside the window seems to stop breathing for a moment. In that chromatic pause, that motionless shimmer, lies 4:00 Universe, RJ Messineo’s exhibition at Morán Morán in Los Angeles. Ten large-scale works unfold like a visual, emotional, and meteorological calendar, born from nearly a year of looking and listening. But the viewer is never just a spectator: it’s the artist’s gaze we inhabit, filtering reality through a threshold, the window of her studio, and offering us a vision that is partial, and for that very reason, more true.

The exhibition space is hushed, muffled. The large canvases follow one another like sensitive walls, without clamor. These works don’t shout; they murmur. Carefully modulated lighting accompanies the tonal shifts of the paintings, enhancing the impression that time itself trickles along the edges of the frames. There is no forced path, only drift. One walks as through the chambers of memory, where everything blends: interior and exterior, matter and recollection.

The layout imposes no hierarchy, but reveals subtle relationships. The paintings converse like windows facing the same street on different days. Some are structured in sections, scored by grids recalling window frames, most notably in 4:00 Universe (2020), the centerpiece of the show. This four-panel work charts winter: the browns of fallen leaves, the clear or milky sky, the quiet veins of Troutman Street beneath the skin of the city. And then, at four, the flash, an eruption of vivid pink, a brief incandescence that transforms the mundane into apparition.

Messineo’s medium is painting, but anchored in structure. She works in layers, in gestures that seek not precision but impression: brushstrokes that graze representation without claiming it fully. There’s a trust in fragments, in edges, in the unfinished. Painting becomes an act of witnessing more than depiction. It’s not about “rendering” the world beyond the window, but letting it happen across the canvas. Her compositional frameworks, those simulated windowpanes, don’t trap the image; they guide it through its process of becoming and un-becoming. They are windows within windows, porous membranes welcoming both streetlight and indoor shadow.

Messineo seems to suggest that no image is ever complete. “From the window always comes an impression,” she writes. There’s a poetics of doubt here, an epistemology of the unstable. Each painting is a gesture toward, a yielding, an attempt. The world is already extraordinary, in its mutability.

Leaving the show, you may feel as if the light on the street has shifted. As though time itself had slipped. What lingers is a color, maybe that deep blue that closes the day before darkness falls, or the shape of a tree, or a glint of glass. But most of all, a renewed desire to look. Not to understand, but to feel. To catch the universe that, each day at four o’clock, passes through us.