SLA Gallery is proud to present Between Stillness and Motion, an exhibition featuring new and selected works by Peter Pacheco and Rasa Valiene—two artists whose distinct practices converge in their shared pursuit of emotional resonance, sensory depth, and the articulation of inner worlds. The exhibition invites visitors to experience the unique yet interconnected ways in which both artists translate inner emotion and lived experience into color, rhythm, and form.
Curated by Julia Rothenberg and Francine Rogers.
Peter Pacheco: The Solitude of Sound and Vision
Peter Pacheco’s work emerges from a life lived both within and beyond the boundaries of the art world. Trained in fine art yet largely self-secluded from its institutional circuits, Pacheco has developed his painterly language in private—working evenings and weekends from his home studio while balancing a demanding career as a nurse in a Long-term acute care. This private practice has allowed him to cultivate a deeply personal approach to painting—one that resists trends and speaks directly to human feeling rather than market expectation.
His canvases, charged with sensuality and existential reflection, evoke experiences of loneliness, terror, and the sublime joy of perception and connection. The painter’s mother, Bessie, an adventurous soul with a deep love of jazz, introduced him to the music that would later shape his sensibility. From Ella Fitzgerald to Miles Davis, Pacheco absorbed the improvisational rhythms and tonal complexities of jazz, translating them into visual form. His brushwork, at once disciplined and spontaneous, recalls the syncopated structure of bebop—the collision of order and frenzy that animates his compositions.
For Pacheco, painting is an act of communication that bridges solitude and community. ‘Art is meant to speak to an audience,’ he notes. This exhibition completes that gesture, extending his vision outward to viewers who can feel the pulse, melancholy, and transcendence that flow through his work. His paintings offer an intimate conversation between silence and sound, stillness and motion, the inner life and the shared human condition.
Rasa Valiene: The Scintillating Mirage of the Soul
Born in Lithuania, Rasa Valiene’s art draws on European aesthetic traditions while reaching toward something interior, poetic, and transcendent. Her work reveals an imaginative reality that is at once luminous and introspective—a mirage of the soul. She creates vibrant, rhythmically patterned compositions in which abstraction and symbolism intertwine, yielding paintings that seem to hover between dream and consciousness.
Valiene’s canvases often feature radiant colors, flowing lines, and organic motifs such as butterflies, flowers, and human forms. These elements suggest transformation, fragility, and the quiet beauty of perception itself. Her use of rhythmic repetition and curving forms gives her paintings a musical quality, as if visual melody were unfolding across the surface. Yet beneath their decorative harmony lies a profound emotional resonance—a faith in beauty and goodness as enduring human values.
In her most recent works, Valiene’s exploration of movement and sound transforms visual art into an almost synesthetic experience. Through her painterly orchestration of color and rhythm, she allows viewers to sense the vibration of life itself—the invisible currents that link emotion, perception, and imagination. Her work reminds us that even in stillness, there is motion; even in silence, there is song.
A Shared Vision
Though their techniques and backgrounds diverge, Peter Pacheco and Rasa Valiene share a deep commitment to exploring the boundaries between emotion and perception, solitude and connection. Both artists transform their personal experiences into meditations on the universal aspects of human existence. In Pacheco’s case, the solitude of his studio becomes a place of emotional revelation, where light and color embody the rhythms of the inner life. For Valiene, color and pattern serve as gateways to transcendence, inviting the viewer into a space where feeling and vision are one.
Together, their works create a conversation across differences—between introspection and exuberance, sound and silence, order and improvisation. The exhibition at SLA Gallery celebrates this dialogue, offering an encounter that is both contemplative and alive with movement. Between Stillness and Motion reminds us that art’s truest power lies in its ability to bridge inner experience and shared understanding—to connect, to move, and to transform.
Exhibition Details
Location: SLA Gallery, SLA ART SPACE 307 w 30th St. NY, NY
Exhibition Dates: October 29-November 31, 2025
Opening Reception: October 29th 5-9pm
Gallery Hours: Friday and Saturday 2-6pm or by appointment.
Contact: francinernyc@gmail.com]
