Gregory Raymond Halili	NOSTALGIA
	June 1 - July 6, 2002 at Nancy Hoffman Gallery
	Gregory Raymond Halili was born in the Philippines and came to this country with his family as a teenager. His memories of childhood years, so rich with visual texture and fabric, visits to butterfly jungles, vistas of skies filled with wispy clouds and silhouettes of palm trees in the night, a kind of tropical paradise--are ever present in his mind and indeed, in his work.
	The show in two parts: images of the night--which might be called "in search of paradise;" and the artist's second "Butterfly Collection," a piece comprising 120 individual watercolors, includes themes dear to the artist which he has explored throughout this work. He says: " In my paintings I use my experience as an element and guide in making art. "Nostalgia" is the very foundation of my work and the beginning of my creative process. What I create, unfinished or accomplished, is the translation of my memories. It is the essence of remembering that is the catalyst for most of my inspirations."
	Halili also travels widely in this country, in the Philippines and in Europe. When he does so, he is never without his sketchbook; drawing people, places, colors, sunsets, moonrises, and capturing treasured moments quickly in wash, pen or pencil. In his miniature scale paintings, measuring from 1x1 inch (on paper 7x5 inches) up to 10 x12 inches, lie a world of mystery and magic.
	Like a magnet that draws metal shavings to it from force fields surrounding, Halili's intimate watercolors draw us into the image, be it an image of the night in indigo blue or golden sepia, or a butterfly alighting on a batik or lace. The artist has said of his scale: "Miniaturism is my way of representing and manifesting a world that seems so distant yet so clear. Miniatures have the physical fragility and intimacy which attracts the viewer closer into my world."
	In the nighttime paintings, Halili traces a trajectory of color from indigo blue to warm deep sepia. Many of the nightscapes have a moon glimmering behind a mesh curtain drawn by the artist in the thinnest golden or silver lines.
	The viewer peers through the curtain to the mysteries of the night; there are palms, fronds, sometimes flowers or fireflies, at others clouds, a path, a slice of landscape. The nighttime pieces invite one to enter a tropical, peaceful, quiet dream world.
	Halili's new "Butterfly Collection"--the work of four years--depicts butterflies on a range of fabrics, some lace, some antique Japanese, and others complex batiks of many colors. In creating the butterflies, Halili's interests moved from the butterfly to the fabric and background.
	Like the transition in color of the nightscapes, the artist had a vision for a rainbow of butterflies. He said he felt as much a "weaver (as a painter) with a needle, stitching, knitting and entwining fabrics, consumed by the challenge of painting laces and batiks with a paint brush that looks and feels like a needle.
	It is the magic and relationship of intricately patterned fabric with shimmering butterfly that holds the viewer as the eye moves from blue to yellow to green to red to gold, watching the flight of that most evanescent of flying creatures, the symbol of beauty, transformation, fragility and all that is ethereal.
	Gregory Raymond Halili was born in Manila, Philippines in 1975. He received his B.F.A. from the University of the Arts in Philadelphia. His work has been shown at The Arkansas Arts Center, Little Rock; Arnot Art Museum, Elmira, New York; Artists' House Gallery, Philadelphia;
	Miniature Painters, Sculptors and Gravers Society of Washington, D.C; Hammond Museum and Sculpture Garden, Salem, New York; and John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art, Sarasota, Florida. He has won awards from numerous institutions including the Art Institute of New Jersey; "Trenton Times" (New Jersey); and the United Nations Postal Administration. He was named Governor's School of the Arts Scholar (New Jersey) and is listed in "Who's Who Among American Students."
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