Lying, But Only A Little
‘LYING, BUT ONLY A LITTLE’
MARK ACETELLI AND KRISTI HEAD TURN THE LANDSCAPE INTO SOMETHING LESS RELIABLE AT INTERVAL GALLERY
Kristi Head, Waiting for the Wind to Change, 2025 / Mark Acetelli, Autumn, 2023. Courtesy of the artists and INTERVAL Gallery.
There are no reliable maps in ‘Lying, but only a little’.
The new exhibition at INTERVAL Gallery brings together Mark Acetelli and Kristi Head, two Los Angeles-based painters whose works use the vocabulary of landscape while steadily dismantling its obligation to describe a real place.
What remains is more interesting: memory without documentation, nature without geography, light detached from source, places that seem recognizable until the eye tries to locate them.
The exhibition asks a simple question without making too much ceremony of it: can an image be factually false and emotionally exact?
For Mark Acetelli, the answer lies in subtraction. His recent painting has moved increasingly toward what he calls “emotional clarity over complexity.” Across Autumn (2023), Dissidence and Resolve (2024) and Fire in the Sky (2026), landscape is progressively reduced until light itself begins to carry the image.
As contemporary life grows increasingly saturated, Acetelli describes the work as moving in the opposite direction, toward something “almost a sedative to the chaos.” His interest in Turner, Monet and music with “space between the notes” appears in paintings where absence is not emptiness but room.
Kristi Head reaches quiet through accumulation rather than reduction. Her landscapes are imagined constructions formed from visual memory, color, movement, nature and intuition. She does not attempt to reproduce a location; remembered fragments reorganize themselves until a place appears that feels real enough to recognize and strange enough not to exist.
Head traces part of that instinct to childhood, when she would stare into patterned wallpaper and discover new images embedded inside it — “worlds inside worlds.” That idea continues throughout the work.
Waiting for the Wind to Change (2025), a 67 × 132-inch oil painting, appears almost violently in motion while its underlying proposition is one of waiting: remaining still until the moment to move arrives. We’ve Been Here Before (2025) shifts closer toward psychological landscape, while The Softest Valley (2024) turns the unseen space beyond a hill into a proposition of possibility.
[FACT CHECK — The Softest Valley's date and medium aren't confirmed anywhere in Kristi's own supplied materials]
“Find space and expansion inside yourself no matter how small or constrained your world feels.” — Kristi Head
A developing hand-painted silk dress will extend Head’s landscape language beyond painting, introducing the body as another possible surface for a place that does not quite exist.
Despite their formal differences, Acetelli and Head ultimately meet at the same point. Both refuse the landscape as evidence. Both use memory without requiring accuracy. Both allow ambiguity to become a form of emotional precision.
“Los Angeles has always been a city of reinvention and light. Mark and Kristi each approach those ideas differently, but both share a commitment to creating spaces for contemplation, emotion and presence. In a time of constant noise, these works invite us to slow down, to look more carefully, and to rediscover the quiet power of observation.” — Mark Hampton, Founder, INTERVAL Gallery
‘Lying, but only a little’ opens at INTERVAL Gallery in Los Angeles on 26 September 2026 and continues through 10 October 2026.
EXHIBITION: ‘Lying, but only a little’
ARTISTS: Mark Acetelli, Kristi Head
Opening: Saturday, 26 September 2026
Exhibition: 26 September – 2 October 2026 (Private viewings by appointment)
ARTISTS
Mark Acetelli — Instagram: @mark_acetelli — Website: www.markacetelli.com
Kristi Head — Instagram: @kristi_head — Website: www.kristihead.com
INTERVAL GALLERY