Reset

In Reset, Kris Gavino charts a liminal space where time loses its tyranny—where the past no longer haunts, and the future no longer threatens. What remains is the present: fragile, vivid, suspended like a breath held between sleep and waking. Gavino’s latest suite of paintings contemplates time not as a sequence but as a felt experience, subjective and shifting, folded in on itself by memory, imagination, and desire.

Here, time is not kept by calendars or clocks, but by the human body—its weariness, its need for stillness, its quiet rituals of renewal. In “Rejuvenation,” a slumbering figure lies between worlds, cradled by a landscape that seems less inhabited than dreamed. The borders between body and ground blur, as if sleep itself were a threshold where the interior self dissolves into the elements. The atmosphere is one of silence, solitude, and that elusive sense of repose that arrives only when we surrender the need to measure or control.

Gavino punctuates these soft, introspective settings with the image of a clock—an object made for personal timekeeping, capable of being rewound, reset. Set against imagined terrains, the watch becomes a poignant marker of human presence: minuscule in the face of geologic time, yet insistently ticking. How absurd, the works seem to ask, to frame the ancient earth with our fleeting concerns. And yet, how deeply human to try.

In “Silence Between Thoughts,” a quiet self-portrait begins to fade into the landscape, as though the figure were not placed upon nature but made of it. There is no drama in the dissolution, only a steady, graceful yielding—a reminder that all things, including the self, are subject to erosion. The title evokes the ephemeral space between mental noise, where clarity sometimes blooms: not in assertion, but in the pause.

Gavino writes, “Perspective is subjective. Having vision without sight may lead us to rely on the other senses, at times can be overwhelming. It is foolish to run the risk of going mad for sanity’s sake. Rest becomes more costly the more we need it... Ultimately, there will come an event where life will hit the reset button.” That “reset” may arrive suddenly or slowly, as a rupture or as grace. Either way, Reset invites us to meet it—not with resistance, but with awareness. To dwell, if only briefly, in a space outside of time. To listen for the silence. To rest.

And perhaps, in doing so, to begin again.