There is something delicious about the commingling of delight and horror, or really any opposition of sensations pushed to their extremes:  confectionary sweetness with an aftertaste on the wrong side of savory—the foreshadowing of decay; the sweetness of rain-drenched foliage followed by the mineral-laden scent of ozone rising from the dampened earth; the little girl in the red rain slicker and wellies who turns out to be an axe-wielding dwarf. 

Barry Gordon, Societal View: Stable Table and Other Life Patterns. Oil on canvas, 50 x 40 inches. Courtesy of the artist and Tieken Gallery.

You can almost taste this odd chemistry in the group show up at Tieken Gallery in Chinatown—something of a lost, corrupted dream of childhood that’s somehow better, more richly appreciated the second go-round.  Or even hear it—in the banshee scream of color issuing from the almost abstract idylls of Barry Gordon, who might be the artistic love child of Joan Miró and Jay Ward; or the menacing hum of a swarm of bees: there’s a room (or hive?) of more than a hundred by Gus Harper, who has made something of a specialty of his obsession. 

Gus Harper, Good Luck Bees, installation view. Courtesy of the artist and Tieken Gallery.

A room like that might drive you mad; which is why we happily return to the angel fish serenely swimming alongside a cetaceous lamprey spouting a plume of vasculature morphing into saguaro cactus, or birds with whiplash plumage contending with ferocious flying fish in Gordon’s Ernst-inflected fractured fairy tales. 

Simone Gad, Auto-Portrait à Chinatown (2018). Photo by Ezrha Jean Black.

Then we come to the temples, pagodas, bars and shop windows of Simone Gad.  We can call this Chinatown, but it’s really a magical city where the forbidden is both mourned and celebrated.  The upturned, artichoke-leaf roofs effervesce and explode in red, from carnation and carnelian pink to rich scarlets, crimsons and Chinese reds.  Darkened recesses in slashes of blue and black are framed by yellows and impastoed whites as thick as frosting.  Bright yellow shop windows become jewel cases melting away their treasures. 

Simone Gad, Buddhist Temple on Alpine Street (side view), 2018. Photo by Ezrha Jean Black.

Directly alongside is a selection of Gad’s no less thickly impastoed works on paper with magazine collage from a decade ago, dark meditations on the lingering gaze of fame.  Gad carves out a safe and sacred space for black framed magazine-print beauties like Ursula Andress, Marianne Faithfull and Pam Grier in Victorian-Italianate arcades and cupolas—wood-butchered doll-opera houses in slashes of red, blue, verdigris and turquoise to hold their faces and voices like the luminous vessels they are.  There’s such incandescent joy and sadness in this work.  Gad has a finger on the fetish she plays like a Mozart cadenza. 

Simone Gad, Barry Gordon, and Gus Harper, September 8 – October 13, 2018, at Tieken Gallery LA, 961 Chung King Road, Chinatown, Los Angeles, CA 90012. fredtieken.com

The artists will all be present at Tieken Gallery for conversation and audience questions this coming Saturday, September 29th at 3:00 p.m.