In the shifting terrain between image and idea, between object and memory, painter Brad Overton constructs a visual language that is both intimate and universal. His exhibition, Symbols and Symmetries, on view at Blue Rain Gallery through October 7, 2025, unfolds as an extended meditation on presence — how symbols, toys, and talismanic forms hold meaning far beyond their material surface.
This is not an exhibition of things but of echoes: the memory of a moonlit pool, the enduring rhythm of forms that recur in both nature and spirit. Overton positions his canvases as places of stillness and encounter, where the viewer is asked not only to look but to feel.
At the center of the show is Reflected Moon, a large oil painting that shimmers with restraint. A crescent hovers above a dark pool, its reflection both clear and broken, a reminder that perception is never whole but always fractured by the waters of time.
If you look at the moon’s reflection on the water,
Your own will disappear.
And if you drink from that night pool,
The dancing crescent’s lips on yours,
Its light will fill your heart.
In this accompanying verse, Overton offers a key to the painting: the image is not merely visual but participatory. To look into the pool is to risk dissolution; to drink from it is to take in the light. Here, painting becomes a threshold — an invitation to transformation.
Throughout the exhibition, Overton returns to elemental motifs — circles, mirrored forms, balanced shapes. These symmetries are not perfect duplications but relationships: object to shadow, symbol to silence, memory to imagination. They remind us that meaning is not fixed but relational, shaped by encounter. In this way, Overton’s paintings act like visual koans, asking the viewer to dwell in ambiguity, to find equilibrium not in certainty but in the conversation between opposites.
This sense of tension, between fragility and endurance, is also palpable in a work that depicts a galloping toy rider on horseback, set against a fierce, geometric backdrop of color. It is both playful and charged, conjuring the layered histories embedded in cultural symbols. Here, the toy is not innocent but freighted with memory, history, and the echo of conflict. The resonance is captured beautifully in the poem The Hollyhock Wars:
First they fought the wind
To a standstill.
Nothing moved.
Then they fought the sun.
After several weeks
It was a draw.
Then came the storms.
Their colors brightened
And their numbers increased.
The territory was won.
Across the plains, tall green stalks
Bearing bright faces.
Symbols and Symmetries reminds us that art is not only a record of what has been, but a rehearsal for what endures. Overton’s paintings linger in the space between play and gravity, where the simplest of forms — a toy, a circle, a crescent moon — take on the weight of myth. They are reminders that symbols survive not by remaining unchanged, but by adapting, brightening, and reasserting themselves in new contexts, much like the hollyhocks that return each season, taller and more vivid after the storm. To encounter these works is to enter into that cycle of persistence and renewal, to see how the ordinary can be transfigured into the extraordinary, and how memory itself can be a form of light.
