BolsterArts is pleased to present A Conditional Sky, bringing together oil paintings by Chris Cortez and Ali Sutton. Across distinct bodies of work, both artists treat atmosphere as an affective register, tracing how interior life is negotiated under conditions of stability and care.

Cortez’s Bajo la Misma Luna is a series of sky paintings derived from an ongoing archive of photographs she collects while traveling to her family hometown, Joaquín Camaño, Mexico. Cortez’s restraint, light suspended, time stalled, invokes longing and nostalgia without collapsing into sentimentality. The clouds pull against the sky as light breaks through, a threshold, a moment just before something happens or just after it has passed.

Referencing the film La misma Luna, Cortez frames the sky as a tether, a shared structure we can look to when care is stretched across borders. In Atrapada (Con Ganas de Salir), Cortez shifts from atmosphere to figuration, drawing on the multiplayer mechanics of video games to transform the suspended bubble into a metaphor for isolation, emotional survival, and the restorative force of friendship.

Sutton’s psychologically charged figurative paintings draw from her lived experience with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. Her figures inhabit mythic environments that echo the fever of intrusive thought and the entanglement of narratives we cannot escape. Rendered in radiant, unnatural color, the works hover in a heightened register between fantasy and unease. Bodies appear suspended between vulnerability and transformation, as self-awareness tips toward self-surveillance. In Sutton’s work, care is not comfort, it is the ongoing labor of witnessing the self without turning away.

Exhibited together in New York at this moment, these works feel urgently attuned to contemporary life, where mental health, migration, and access to stability shape everyday experience. Sutton and Cortez propose painting as both witness and refuge, mapping what it means to remain tethered, to one another and to the self, beneath the same sky.