Liquid Light
“I have an interest in the invisible light, the light perceptible only in the mind...I want to address the light that we see in dreams.” – James Turrell
In the study of American art history the remarkable quality of natural light in Southern California has taken on a heroic cast, beginning with the luminous and hard-won balance of grandeur and naturalism in Albert Bierstadt’s landscapes. And though his may not be the first name that comes to mind when contemplating the architectural, atmospheric multi-sensory experiences of James Turrell’s fiercely physical and puckishly conceptual constructs, Bierstadt’s privileging of ambient light over features of the territory so that the very towering canopies and soaring stones of awe-inspiring Yosemite played straight man to the spun gold of late afternoon laid the foundation for subsequent generations of artists who have produced a nearly infinite universe of variations on Bierstadt’s awe.
Turrell speaks of the properties of light all the time of course, and it is easy to see why certain kinds of painters take his observations to heart. It could have been Bierstadt, or Ansel Adams, or Robert Irwin or John McCracken who said this (but it was Turrell): “Light is a substance that is, in fact, a thing, but we don't attribute thing-ness to it. We use light to illuminate other things, something we read, sculpture, paintings. And it gladly does this. But the most interesting thing to find is that light is aware that we are looking at it, so that it behaves differently when we are watching it and when we're not, which imbues it with consciousness.”
Liquid Light celebrates and responds to the much-anticipated installation of the only public skyspace in Southern California constructed by this iconic and iconoclastic artist, currently open at nearby Pomona College. The group of eleven painters assembled by the gallery share a few basic traits; they all live and work in Southern California, they occupy in a broad sense the territory of visual abstraction (though employing starkly diverse conceptual and formal processes), and each of them has found a route by which to negotiate the intersection of the imagined and the natural, reducing the operations of perception to what they consider its essence.
Roland Reiss regularly experiments with layering transparent surfaces, pushing the boundaries of two-dimensional compositions as far as possible without abandoning the painting idiom for sculpture, incessantly experimenting with non-traditional materials and weighing the demands of theory with the desires of form. Like Reiss, Lita Albuquerque’s crisply defined shapes lack object-counterparts, and her expressive atmospherics manage to be both precise and ephemeral. Often flecked with gold as both a symbolic and optical gesture, she achieves a paradoxical stasis between line and color, faithfully rendering the contours of her imagination with the fastidiousness of a portraitist. Alexander Couwenberg’s tectonic formalism is both monumental and malleable, casual and deliberate, bypassing referents and getting straight to the basics of perception, eliciting space and depth without recourse to imagery.
Patrick Wilson also balances the architectural and atmospheric. He plays with scale, situating passages of concise linear action at the margins of serene color fields, giving the viewer a sense of survey and discovery while also capitulating to the human impulse toward mark-making. Dawn Arrowsmith shares Wilson’s quality of deceptive simplicity. Her unapologetically spiritual take on minimalism, like Op-Art Suprematism, creates a still moment of contemplation, the visual equivalent of meditation, and generously leaves room for whatever the viewer brings to the encounter. Like Rothko, she is engaged with the psychological and emotional impact of color.
But not everyone is so well-mannered. Jimi Gleason’s confectionary paintings are saved from whimsy by the folded, pleated, kneaded evidence of labor-intensive, obsessive activity; they plead a case for beauty and joy, even as their dense passages of rich geological detail dare viewer’s to solve the mystery of their making. Gregg Renfrow paints on cast acrylic, creating refractive dimensions for the light to bounce around in, and slick surfaces that both emanate and absorb light and movement. Like Renfrow, Michel Tabori’s enthusiasm for the coquettish melodrama of the finish fetish derives from a desire to replicate his encounters with natural phenomenon, rather than narrate them. His large-scale images refer to blurry impressions of landscapes passed at great speed, a sense of motion evoked in the ceaseless kaleidoscope of reflection and refraction of his high-sheen surfaces.
Suzan Woodruff is also concerned with motion, but not her own. She deliberately abandons the evolution of her compositions to the laws of the natural world such as gravity and friction, so that her emotional and sensual poured-paint images are often read as landscapes not because they picture them but because they are made from the same elements and so resemble them without representation. So too Sharon Weiner’s poured layers, saturated and translucent pigmentation, and organic shapes evoke rather than render the roiling atmospheres of what could be either clouds, microorganisms, both or neither. And Andy Moses, for his part, makes a concerted effort to take on all these issues and more. His striated compositions come within a hair’s breadth of seascape as multiple horizons and diffuse light sources, elusive, rich hues of deep rose and indigo and iridescent pigments of pearly white and mystical platinum look like the ocean at the edge of the world. In fact, it is the other way around. These paintings are not about how the divergence of abstraction and representation, but rather about the inscrutable mystery and illusion that persist in the world of objects.
From the disciplined and scholarly to the capricious and whimsical, from the precious to the exuberant, from the lusty to the stoic, from the refined to the romantic and from the soulful to the cerebral, perhaps the most important thing these artists share with Turrell really is Bierstadt’s legacy: an inexhaustible capacity for seeing that which is, and that which is not, there.
Shana Nys Dambrot
Los Angeles 2007
In the study of American art history the remarkable quality of natural light in Southern California has taken on a heroic cast, beginning with the luminous and hard-won balance of grandeur and naturalism in Albert Bierstadt’s landscapes. And though his may not be the first name that comes to mind when contemplating the architectural, atmospheric multi-sensory experiences of James Turrell’s fiercely physical and puckishly conceptual constructs, Bierstadt’s privileging of ambient light over features of the territory so that the very towering canopies and soaring stones of awe-inspiring Yosemite played straight man to the spun gold of late afternoon laid the foundation for subsequent generations of artists who have produced a nearly infinite universe of variations on Bierstadt’s awe.
Turrell speaks of the properties of light all the time of course, and it is easy to see why certain kinds of painters take his observations to heart. It could have been Bierstadt, or Ansel Adams, or Robert Irwin or John McCracken who said this (but it was Turrell): “Light is a substance that is, in fact, a thing, but we don't attribute thing-ness to it. We use light to illuminate other things, something we read, sculpture, paintings. And it gladly does this. But the most interesting thing to find is that light is aware that we are looking at it, so that it behaves differently when we are watching it and when we're not, which imbues it with consciousness.”
Liquid Light celebrates and responds to the much-anticipated installation of the only public skyspace in Southern California constructed by this iconic and iconoclastic artist, currently open at nearby Pomona College. The group of eleven painters assembled by the gallery share a few basic traits; they all live and work in Southern California, they occupy in a broad sense the territory of visual abstraction (though employing starkly diverse conceptual and formal processes), and each of them has found a route by which to negotiate the intersection of the imagined and the natural, reducing the operations of perception to what they consider its essence.
Roland Reiss regularly experiments with layering transparent surfaces, pushing the boundaries of two-dimensional compositions as far as possible without abandoning the painting idiom for sculpture, incessantly experimenting with non-traditional materials and weighing the demands of theory with the desires of form. Like Reiss, Lita Albuquerque’s crisply defined shapes lack object-counterparts, and her expressive atmospherics manage to be both precise and ephemeral. Often flecked with gold as both a symbolic and optical gesture, she achieves a paradoxical stasis between line and color, faithfully rendering the contours of her imagination with the fastidiousness of a portraitist. Alexander Couwenberg’s tectonic formalism is both monumental and malleable, casual and deliberate, bypassing referents and getting straight to the basics of perception, eliciting space and depth without recourse to imagery.
Patrick Wilson also balances the architectural and atmospheric. He plays with scale, situating passages of concise linear action at the margins of serene color fields, giving the viewer a sense of survey and discovery while also capitulating to the human impulse toward mark-making. Dawn Arrowsmith shares Wilson’s quality of deceptive simplicity. Her unapologetically spiritual take on minimalism, like Op-Art Suprematism, creates a still moment of contemplation, the visual equivalent of meditation, and generously leaves room for whatever the viewer brings to the encounter. Like Rothko, she is engaged with the psychological and emotional impact of color.
But not everyone is so well-mannered. Jimi Gleason’s confectionary paintings are saved from whimsy by the folded, pleated, kneaded evidence of labor-intensive, obsessive activity; they plead a case for beauty and joy, even as their dense passages of rich geological detail dare viewer’s to solve the mystery of their making. Gregg Renfrow paints on cast acrylic, creating refractive dimensions for the light to bounce around in, and slick surfaces that both emanate and absorb light and movement. Like Renfrow, Michel Tabori’s enthusiasm for the coquettish melodrama of the finish fetish derives from a desire to replicate his encounters with natural phenomenon, rather than narrate them. His large-scale images refer to blurry impressions of landscapes passed at great speed, a sense of motion evoked in the ceaseless kaleidoscope of reflection and refraction of his high-sheen surfaces.
Suzan Woodruff is also concerned with motion, but not her own. She deliberately abandons the evolution of her compositions to the laws of the natural world such as gravity and friction, so that her emotional and sensual poured-paint images are often read as landscapes not because they picture them but because they are made from the same elements and so resemble them without representation. So too Sharon Weiner’s poured layers, saturated and translucent pigmentation, and organic shapes evoke rather than render the roiling atmospheres of what could be either clouds, microorganisms, both or neither. And Andy Moses, for his part, makes a concerted effort to take on all these issues and more. His striated compositions come within a hair’s breadth of seascape as multiple horizons and diffuse light sources, elusive, rich hues of deep rose and indigo and iridescent pigments of pearly white and mystical platinum look like the ocean at the edge of the world. In fact, it is the other way around. These paintings are not about how the divergence of abstraction and representation, but rather about the inscrutable mystery and illusion that persist in the world of objects.
From the disciplined and scholarly to the capricious and whimsical, from the precious to the exuberant, from the lusty to the stoic, from the refined to the romantic and from the soulful to the cerebral, perhaps the most important thing these artists share with Turrell really is Bierstadt’s legacy: an inexhaustible capacity for seeing that which is, and that which is not, there.
Shana Nys Dambrot
Los Angeles 2007
