Masaru Kurose, Ward Schumaker

MASARU KUROSE

mudai: recent paintings

November 14 – December 22, 2012

reception Saturday, November 17, 5:00–8:00 PM

MASARU KUROSE
Mudai 20, 2012
cat. no. MAK20
oil on vinyl on wood stretcher
28.5 x 24 in.

For LA15 in the front room we are showing recent paintings by Kobe, Japan based artist Masaru Kurose. Kurose, who was trained as an architect, continues his exploration of oil paint on clear vinyl, an industrial support that belies the tradition and antecedent of his stretched "canvases." Vinyl allows the internal structure of Kurose's painting to show through, much in the way that a glass and steel building incorporates the supporting girder into its external sheathing. Kurose anticipates the collision of his drawn stroke with the exposed bracing of his painting's wooden chassis, and the drop effect of the paint's shadow cast unpredictably in different lights against the wall. He thus sets up a double plane, the skin of paint floating on its transparent ground against the solid wall, shadow and reflection each a measured step behind the other. Kurose's gesture is also a mixture of measure and hunch, his highly keyed hues carried by meandering strokes that are in turn considered and discovered. To see the paintings one must see through them. Their depth is sustained by an integrated drawing, an armature for color and light that supports both on more than one level and tends to splay itself wide open. Kurose's architecture, pervasive as it is across multiple surfaces, confounds the pictorial hierarchy of figure and ground we associate with the obvious historical precedent of stained glass, and positions these translucent works in the camp of painting's fresh potential, and in the ongoing understanding of painting's radical roots.

WARD SCHUMAKER dumb boxes November 14 – December 22, 2012 reception Saturday, November 17, 5:00–8:00 PM

WARD SCHUMAKER
Begins Each Moment (Dumb Box #2), 2012
cat. no. WAS39
acrylic and paste on wood, cardboard
15 x 7 x 10 in.

In the middle gallery for our 15th rotation in Los Angeles, we are showing the painted objects of Ward Schumaker, selections from a series of polychromed constructions he refers to as his Dumb Boxes. These are amongst the first works Schumaker completed after his move from San Francisco to New York last year, and in many ways reflect the energy, gridded planes and silvery daylight of his newly adopted city. Often an artist fresh to New York is caught in an onrush of memory and internal ponder that acts as ballast against the sensory overload from outside. The poet Michael McClure imagined the painter Franz Kline as caught in a world of night sweats. A certain kind of leeching occurs. Schumaker's characteristic layering of text and image and gesture and wit is particularly well-suited to externalizing reflection. I suspect upon arrival he simply found the flat plane of his canvases and panels suddenly inadequate for containing whatever poured forth. And yet a life in the studio instilled in Schumaker the discipline to contain it just so. The result is an isometric suspension between sculpture and painting, neutral in its initial effect and then persistently corrosive, eating away at the membrane between the unconscious and the waking life. His biographical titles reinforce this effect, but like reviews without spoilers, do nothing to curtail the necessity of simply looking, and participating in the unfolding, like pinewood origami gates, of Schumaker's open borders.