The title of the two-person show at Cheremoya, “Conversion,” has a twofold implication: religious and material transformation. Calla Donofrio’s desaturated paintings depict acts of (sometimes sexual) violence that have been censored by parts of the image being blacked out or disrupted by a black cross. Shiny and diligently uniform, the paintings have a materiality to them that meets the sepia-toned flatness in a way that feels unreal, like a digitally rendered dream. In An Eye for an Eye, anonymous hands grip a central figure, covering his mouth and threatening him with a knife. Each limb is indistinguishable and possesses an unnerving level of smoothness, save for the over-articulated veins and cartilage sprouting from the hands. We see the central figure on the verge of getting his eyes gouged out, the sight blocked by a small black cross. 

At the center of the room, Kento Saisho’s small, blackened sculptures sit on a table covered in sheet metal. Made from steel and enamel and mostly in vessel form, these structures are spiky and menacing despite their fragile, burned appearance. Striking and strange, they ask to be intimately examined. Upon peering into the vessel’s opening, you see that tiny metal spikes dot the insides, like an inverted porcupine. Saisho’s sculptures have undergone a transmutative process. Many of his works include “crucible” in the title, connecting the form to the mode of making and creating a self-reproducing system. Flame also appears in Donofrio’s painting Trinity, where it is siloed in a cinematically cropped box, merely taunting instead of scorching. 

In contrast to Donofrio’s paintings, Saisho’s sculptures have a real, or simply less literal, sense of movement between danger and frailty, the material and the spiritual. Where Donofrio’s paintings are purgatorial, Saisho’s vessels offer a sorely needed rebirth. The ricochet that occurs between the two artists’ works is initially buoyant—each lends the other a distinct layer—but it peters out eventually. The potential for a mutual material becoming is left unfulfilled. 

Conversion: Calla Donofrio and Kento Saisho
Cheremoya
2700 W. Ave. 34
Los Angeles, CA 90065
On view through May 10, 2025