Linda Vallejo at Cal Sate University San Bernardino

Linda Vallejo's Make 'Em All Mexican series featured in Cal Sate University San Bernardino's currently running Perspectives exhibition. Panel discussion with the artist October 18, 4-6 PM. For information, call 909-537-7373.

LA14 - Nancy Haynes, Erin Lawlor

NANCY HAYNES

recent paintings

October 10 – November 10, 2012

reception Saturday, October 13, 5:00–8:00 PM

NANCY HAYNES
Referent For Departure, 2012 (cat. no. NAH14)
oil on linen
18.5 x 21.5 in.

For our 14th exhibition in Los Angeles, we showcase in the front gallery recent work by esteemed New York painter Nancy Haynes. Haynes' career spans four decades and she is the recipient of numerous awards, including two NEA grants. She has shown in museums around the country, including the San Diego Museum of Art, the Rubin Museum in New York, the Hood Museum at Dartmouth, and the Harvard University Art Museums. Her work is in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum, MOMA, the Whitney, and the National Gallery. This is her second solo with us. Of her last show, critic Kenneth Baker wrote, "I think of her position as somewhat parallel to Mary Heilmann a decade ago: regarded by colleagues as a standard-bearer of the artistic life, yet little known outside a circuit of fellow professionals and collectors." Just how little-known depends on who you talk to. It is hard to find a serious painter of my generation who doesn't admire Haynes' accomplishment. She has convincingly extended forward into the current moment, something perennial at the root of post-war painting's aspiration. A younger generation, rediscovering the power of the slow reveal, will find inspiration in Haynes' ethic and her means. The challenge with work based on color and light is to preserve the substance, the body wrapped around the spirit, yet Haynes manages to stay firmly grounded. Descriptors we tend not to associate together, such as radiant and earthen, seem aptly paired. Haynes' melding of intellectual rigor and meditative abandon keeps her painting in abeyance, and reveals her image not only slowly, but sustainably. ERIN LAWLOR recent paintings October 10 – November 10, 2012 reception Saturday, October 13, 5:00–8:00 PM ERIN LAWLOR untitled, 2012 (cat. no. ERL17) oil on linen 39.5 x 32 in. In the middle gallery we present a selection of recent paintings by British-born artist Erin Lawlor, who has been living and working in France since 1987. Her work has been exhibited in London, Brussels, Paris and more recently in San Francisco; this is her first solo in Los Angeles. Lawlor's work is characterized by wide, fluid marking, closely-valued, tertiary colors, and matte, light-absorbing surfaces. Although her process involves discipline and self-editing, her painting seems effortlessly suspended, at once turgid and poised. In her own words, she is fascinated by "the small miracle of the way in which painting, in one stroke of the paintbrush and paint, can constitute all at once both space, volume, shape and time." She has synthesized much of the international diaspora of gestural painting (American Abstract Expressionism, in particular Kline and Rothko; the Sumi-inspired aspects of the Japanese Gutai movement such as Kazuo Shiraga, and the French Tachists such as Pierre Soulages come to mind) but with a release of the stress associated with these examples. The undulation between convexity and concavity in Lawlor's color-space recalls the natural rhythm of breathing. These are open images. The juxtaposition of these two artists this month sets up a serendipitous exchange about painting's adeptness at shedding light on the darker end of the chromatic spectrum, and the articulate range of touch.

Culture Monster

Clem Crosby installation at Venice Architectural Biennale

Clem Crosby installation at Venice Architectural Biennale

Haworth Tompkins Limited, Architects

selected panels from the Young Vic Facade

photo credit: David Grandorge

Linda Vallejo

George Lawson Gallery is pleased to announce our representation of Linda Vallejo

El Vis (cat. no. LIV11) 2012

re-purposed plaster figurine, pigment print of original painting, acrylic, and 14k gold leaf
12.5(h) x 7.5(w) x 5.5(d) in.

Marielena: La Fabulosa (cat. no. LIV14) 2012

re-purposed porcelain figurine and acrylic
8.5(h) x 5(w) x 4.5(d) in.

http://www.georgelawsongallery.com/artists/l_vallejo1.html

Jacob Melchi: new paintings, Alma Chaney: nameless spaces: recent paintings

JACOB MELCHI

new paintings

September 5 – October 6, 2012

reception Saturday, September 8, 5:00–8:00 PM

JACOB MELCHI
Double Play 2 (cat. no. JAM14) 2012
oil on linen on aluminium stretcher
23 x 20 in.

We are opening the September season and our 13th exhibition in Culver City with two important painting exhibitions. In the front gallery, we are showing new work by Los Angeles painter Jacob Melchi. Melchi was included here in last February's group of young LA painters; this is his first solo show with the gallery. A 2003 MFA graduate of Otis, Melchi's work has been shown previously at institutions such as The Center for Contemporary Art in Sacramento, The Torrance Art Museum, The Nordic Institute for Contemporary Art in Helsinki, and The Netherlands Media Art Institute in Amsterdam.  Melchi practices a highly sensate, yet disciplined form of painting that uses geometry as its underpinning and the means of paint application as its mode. His process is iterative, his surfaces articulated and nuanced. He builds his image through pentimento and overpainting, paying close attention to the grain of his support and the viscosity of his medium. He leverages to great result slight biases and obliques off the regular weave of his grid, and slight shifts and stops in his stroke. The result is an agile and individuated vernacular that triggers abstract associations while grounding his work in concrete experience. Relatively modest in scale, Melchi's canvases nevertheless hold the wall with authority, and engage the viewer on every level. ALMA CHANEY nameless spaces: recent paintings September 5 – October 6, 2012 reception Saturday, September 8, 5:00–8:00 PM ALMA CHANEY Untitled #8 (cat. no. ALC40) 2012 oil, silverpoint and golpoint on gessoed panel 16 x 16 in. In the middle gallery we are showing recent paintings by Seattle-based artist Alma Chaney, her second solo with the gallery. A 2010 MFA graduate of The San Francisco Art Institute, Chaney also completed post-Baccalaureate work at the Pont-Aven School of Contemporary Art in Brittany, holds a Certificate of Scientific Illustration from the University of Washington, and a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design. In her work Chaney tackles the perennial dichotomy between drawing and painting, employing Renaissance techniques of silverpoint crosshatching beneath layers of opaque, highly mixed, off-whites and translucent glazes of tonal color. Her work presents a real dilemma for a gallerist: it is impossible to reproduce, reveals itself even in person only slowly, and makes no concessions to fashion. What it does is reward patient engagement with a series of unfoldings that could be described as florescent. Chaney manages the studio equivalent of en plein air; she is a painter of shadow and light.

Sara Bright and Clem Crosby in the SF Chronicle

The San Francisco art scene got a little dimmer when George Lawson closed his Geary Street gallery and decamped for Culver City, the latest gallery hot zone in greater Los Angeles.

Recently Gallery 60Six invited him to stage a two-person show here, and he has brought tasty paintings by former San Franciscan, now New Yorker, Sara Bright and Londoner Clem Crosby.

The compatibility of work by artists showing together often matters little, but in this case it strengthens the impressions made by both.

Bright, true to her name, turns out sweetly eccentric pictures that could have taken inspiration from artists such as Richard Tuttle, Howard Hodgkin or the young David Hockney.

"Windy" (2012) exemplifies Bright's manner of thatching together a picture that might or might not be abstract out of blithe-looking brushstrokes. Her titles can invite figurative readings - several mention landscape or weather - but her touch is so relaxed that it tends to make any interpretation feel forced.

Crosby also seems to steer by a pleasure in making and seeing that perhaps only painting can provide at this peculiar moment of its resignation to marginality in a culture blinded by speed and greed.

Crosby paints in oil on panels of aluminum-backed Formica, a slick, impervious support that leaves his brushstrokes looking not merely fluent but wet, in jeopardy of being smeared by a viewer's sleeve.

"King Heroin" (2011) and Crosby's two other pictures here draw attention to their own framing edges by sporting grids apparently arrested as they slump into shapelessness. The grid having given painting bones since the Renaissance, its coming unstrung expresses a sort of listless foreboding plus, paradoxically, a celebratory hint of the medium's liberation from its past.

LeDoux at the Luggage Store: Despite their sense of belatedness, Bright's and Crosby's works, by their relaxed execution and dreamy ambiguity, recall the utopian air that modernist painting emanated from time to time.

The paintings of San Franciscan Neil LeDoux at the Luggage Store take us into a completely different zone, one of strange, tense, seemingly ingrown absurdity.

This exhibition celebrates LeDoux's receipt of the 2012 Tournesol Award given annually by the Headlands Center for the Arts. Its title, "People of Earth," sets an odd tone, wavering between concerned address and cheesy sci-fi nostalgia.

A couple of canvases here, "Star Control" and "Pocket Universe," recall quite clearly pictures from LeDoux's 2009 San Francisco gallery debut.

He traced that earlier series to a childhood memory of finding a magical fountain in the Louisiana woods that he could never locate a second time. The series seemed to allude to Marcel Duchamp's notorious "Fountain" (1917) and moved toward more visceral imagery in the key of Francis Bacon.

I suspected LeDoux then of concocting a personal myth retroactively to account for paintings that even he could not really explain otherwise. Nothing wrong with that, in my view, but he provides no such obvious key to the new pictures.

A couple of scumbled canvases here present as blurry textiles, something like the reverse sides of knotted rugs. A number of others, such as "Shah" (2011-12), display networks of lines, resembling a cat's cradle, spanning a shallow, torn-open picture space.

Similar patterns, looking like abstractions of exposed sinew, reappear throughout the show. They bring to mind the anatomy lesson as a theme with a long history in painting.

But, absent organic figures, anatomy of what?

Of the revenant aliens - invaders from the past - that paintings have become in an amnesiac culture with no more need of handmade images.

Bright and Crosby discover a kind of lyric freedom in the practice of painting now. LeDoux presents it as an ongoing autopsy, relieved here and there by allusions or a flighty pattern, but leaving an impression that is hard to shake.

Sara Bright: Recent Paintings; Clem Crosby: Three Paintings: Noon to 7 p.m. Wednesday-Sunday. Through next Saturday. Gallery 60Six, 66 Elgin Park, S.F. (415) 515-0563. www.gallery60six.com.

Neil LeDoux: People of Earth: Paintings. Through Aug. 11. The Luggage Store, 1007 Market St., S.F. (415) 255-5971. www.luggagestoregallery.org.

Kenneth Baker is The San Francisco Chronicle's art critic. E-mail: kennethbaker@sfchronicle.com

Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/art/article/Bright-s-eccentricity-Crosby-s-marginality-3723760.php#ixzz23klGpneT