Gallagher slowly builds up his abstract canvases by blending bands of luminous color. The resulting striations undulate and glide horizontally or vertically and, in several instances, curve slightly towards one side. Rather than being well-defined stripes, Gallagher's bands merge and integrate slightly along their boundaries and vibrate past the eye. A palette of unfamiliar shades of green, blue, and yellow adds to the energy and imparts an ethereal glow.
Gallagher's paintings, at once expansive and densely layered, reflect his interest in phenomena that are observed from a distance or with the aid of technology. The work suggests a range of associations including harmonic oscillation, scale shifts from miniscule to immense, and the high-speed flow of information. A potential energy seems to repeatedly release and renew itself across the surface of the work and beyond the edges of the paintings. This effect imparts a sense of being in tune with an underlying frequency weaving its way through the visible world. As Patrick Amos says of the work, "Without resorting to nostalgia or irony, the paintings convey both our distance from real experience and the immediacy of the information that replaces it. By slowly and methodically fixing that which is fast and ephemeral, Gallagher temporarily steps outside our technological pace and virtuality to meditate on abstraction in painting and our lives."
