SHOWROOM: Guerra Paint & Pigment Corp.
57-52 58th Place Maspeth, NY
In collaboration with @theNextWaveGallery nextwavegallery.com
Exhibition Dates: Sunday 3/14 – Friday 4/17/2026
Open weekdays from 12-6 pm
Opening Reception: Sunday 3/14/ 2026 from 3-6 pm
When two highly creative, inherently progressive and positively minded people collide, the beginning can feel volcanic. Opposites attract. Sparks fly. Fireworks are briefly mistaken for destiny.
But fireworks burn out. What lasts is the ability to laugh when the smoke clears.
“Couples Therapy: Shenanigans” is about love’s strength — specifically, the kind powered by wit, timing, and a shared understanding that life, when viewed through the proper lens, can be enjoyably absurd.
Barrie paints and sculpts from lived velocity. Her canvases feel like she has eavesdropped on the entire city and enjoyed all she sees. Strangers, fragments, psychic debris — figures emerge mid-gesture, mid-thought, mid-chaos. The paintings feel improvised, but they are razor-aware. She captures the comedy of being human in public — all that fragile awkwardness, all that longing.
Patrick, by contrast, begins with analysis and structure. Plywood becomes body. Cavities are carved like deliberate wounds. Into them he pours dense, textured black pigment — voids that swallow light and refuse sentimentality. Truth is revealed through absence.
Where she accumulates noise, he engineers silence.
Where she expands, he subtracts.
And yet — they both find complimentary joy in their lives they’ve chosen.
Not jokey. Not decorative. They laugh in the way people laugh after decades of living. They laugh because they understand fragility. They laugh because they know things fall apart. They laugh because they have seen enough to know that solemnity is overrated.
Long relationships are not sustained by romance alone. They are sustained by timing — by knowing when to speak, when to step back, and when to laugh instead of escalate..
Their love has not survived by making them twins. They have survived by allowing their differences to remain important — where they can laugh at themselves and with each other.
Couples Therapy: Shenanigans: what happens when a couple is disciplined enough to choose to enjoy their life together.
It’s about enjoying the storms as well as the peaceful moments, keeping your edge, and understanding that sometimes the most radical act in a long partnership is to find the whole thing hilarious.
Love is endurance.
Endurance requires humor.
The rest is shenanigans.
Leave a Comment