Everything* so far, Christo Allegra

Gallery 198 presents Everything* so far, a two-part solo exhibition by Brooklyn artist Christo Allegra, on view November 7–29, 2026, with an opening reception Saturday, November 7 at 7 pm. The show gathers ten years of paintings and drawings made with MARCO, Allegra’s custom software for programmatic painting, then turns the gallery into an open studio, with visitors drawing and painting alongside the artist and collaborators. At the close, the work made together in the gallery is distributed to the people who helped make it. Bringing together a decade of work, the exhibition offers an unusual meeting point between traditional painting and computational experimentation, for visitors drawn to creative coding or simply to the pleasures of looking at paintings. Part I, Everything*, presents ten years of paintings and drawings, including Schizoplicity, a recent series of nine paintings exploring fragmentation and spatial systems. Across all the work, the pictures move between figuration, landscape and abstraction, built from photographs, film stills and art history. “There’s something of Impressionism in the flickering surfaces of Christo’s paintings, where flowers, landscapes, and figures emerge and dissolve in a kind of psychic free fall,” says Billy Merrell, Curatorial Director of Gallery 198. “The paintings invite us to discover images for ourselves rather than simply be told what to see.” Part II, So far, turns the gallery into a working studio and its visitors into collaborators. Joined by artists Banyan Fierer and Julie Gitlin, Allegra invites visitors to draw, paint and try MARCO during open studio hours and demonstrations. MARCO NXT, a new browser-based version of the software, is available now for desktop browsers at eschatological.services/MARCO. MARCO doesn’t tell a painter how to paint; it shows where painting could happen. Written in Processing and projected onto canvas or paper, the software reads a source image as shifting regions of light and shadow and offers them one target at a time. Allegra answers each in pencil and paint, so a misstep can be folded into the picture rather than erased. The practice extends a lineage of painters who built systems that stayed open to the hand, from Alma Thomas and Agnes Martin to the generative artists working today. “I made MARCO because I wanted to understand how a computer could help me learn to paint,” Allegra says. “MARCO says where. And my mind says ‘huh,’ then the hand decides how, over and over again.” Public programs include two open studio weeks: Painting is Movement with Banyan Fierer (November 10–12) and Drawing Energy from Sound with Julie Gitlin (November 17–19), each with an evening talk. On Sunday, November 15 at 5:30 pm, Giorgia Lupi leads Painting Visualizations, a conversation with Allegra, Gitlin and Fierer; RSVP required. The Closing Distribution is Saturday, November 28, 1–6 pm. Christo Allegra is a Brooklyn-based artist who approaches technology from a queer, humanist position, and holds an MFA in Design Media Arts from UCLA. Gallery 198 is at 198 24th Street, Brooklyn. R to 25th St; D, N or R to 36th St.