THE ABSTRACT POWER SHOW brings together six Los Angeles artists who each delve and divulge into the various operational modes of abstraction:
JIMI GLEASON uses reflective metallic paints to emphasize the perceptual power of light in art, but in an historical departure from traditional Light & Space artists, grounds this experience in the context of expressionistic painting.
EMILY ELISA HALPERN is best known for balancing vast expanses of visual ambiance with passages of dramatic, urgent fracture and contrasting colors. Not an expressionist in painting’s traditional sense, she arrives at expressionism as a pictorial solution, keeping the possibilities of her practice quite fresh.
FARZAD KOHAN has a fundamental appreciation of abstraction inherent in writing, signage, and calligraphy. The scrawls that mean so much to some groups of people are indecipherable scribbles to others. His paintings thrive in this chasm between the recognized and the inscrutable.
LOREN PHILIP is a master of the elegantly anarchic painting ethos formerly known as expressionism. Beyond language, painting without reference embodies the poignancy of the moment and the ambition of eternity. Aspiring to such intimacies along with those heights, this painter maintains a rigorous studio aesthetic to orchestrate the crashing waves of paint into a relic of exquisiteness.
STEVE SELESKA believes in sculptural texture as a foundation for rigorous, constructed paintings. Surface build-up creates a poetic push-pull where viewers veer from embracing illusionistic space within the 3-D surface to the sense that this might be wall sculpture defying the portal-like foundation of most paintings.
MICHAEL TORQUATO DE NICOLA collages energy in frenzied paintings that belie both their process and compositional architecture. They appear to have sprung up almost instantaneously and yet their labored, layered spatial density is the result of anything but brevity.
