Achoo!

This is still life painting at its most audacious — a humble tissue box transformed into a fully realized portrait, commanding an 8 x 8 inch canvas with the gravity of a Dutch master and the wit of a contemporary iconoclast. Chris Adessa strips away color entirely, wielding a finely nuanced monochrome palette to make form sing: every fold of that erupting tissue crackles with energy, practically leaping off the dark ground toward the viewer. This is not decoration — it is a dare, a challenge to look again at the objects you reach for without thinking. Part of Adessa's celebrated Everyday Sacred series, this small-format oil carries outsized presence. Its scale makes it eminently collectable and versatile — equally at home in a curated gallery wall or as a singular, conversation-starting focal point. Works from this series are held in prestigious collections including UCSF Hospital and Jane Goodall's personal collection, and have been exhibited at the di Rosa Center for Contemporary Art, the Triton Museum of Art, and MarinMOCA. Acquiring Achoo! means owning a piece of a critically recognized, museum-exhibited body of work at an accessible entry point. Adessa's paintings are investments in a distinctive artistic voice — one forged through decades of plein air discipline, refined in a Sausalito studio overlooking the San Francisco Bay, and focused with laser precision on the sacred within the everyday. Achoo! is proof that the most powerful art doesn't need grand subjects. It just needs an uncompromising eye.