Andy Piedilato’s work evokes smashed cities at English Kills — Photo by Lolo Rodríguez

With one dollar PBRs, live music and a barbecue bonfire out in the front garden, the art party spirit is being kept alive this winter at English Kills, the quirky gallery space behind the police station on Forrest Street.

Saturday night’s opening featured Andy Piedilato’s massive canvasses distributed in the gallery’s two main rooms, which, weathering the cold, were populated by a large crowd of artists, art lovers and garden variety hipsters from the neighborhood and beyond.

Piedilato’s work, a thick layering of figuration, drips and smudges, organization and chaos, evokes the images we would see in the press — if they were available — from the streets of Gaza.

Working in a mammoth scale, Piedilato starts by crafting a structure of out-of-square brick, cinder-block and floor board patterns. These borderline stable/unstable outlines get shattered to smithereens by kinetic-expressionist angry blotches and smears.

From this abstract topography emerge a variety of figures and symbols, including demonic dogs and other scary beasts.

Some of the paintings on view stray a bit from this basic blueprint, featuring a sunken battleship or submarine, factory smokestacks, snowflakes or, most notably, a gorgeous stone castle on a white background, free of any smudges or smears.

Andrew Hurst’s music, a sort of industrial tinged boogie-woogie with a punk heart while solidly grounded in the blues, kept the party going after the art had been digested.

The show runs until February 15th.

English Kills Art Gallery
114 Forrest Street

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