CONCRETE MATTER & LIQUEFIED HORIZONS

JULY 16 – AUGUST 19, 2016

OPENING RECEPTION:
SATURDAY, JULY 16, 2016, 6 – 8 PM

GARBOUSHIAN GALLERY is pleased to present a group exhibition featuring four fascinating contemporary artists in the gallery’s mid-summer show, entitled Concrete Matter & Liquefied Horizons.

Creating a dialogue between the four artists with similar style, vigor, color and abstraction, these artists have come together in one space to bring contemporary West Coast style and energy to life through and with their abstract works of art. Jonathan Apgar, Jonni Cheatwood, Max Presneill and Nano Rubio all live and work in Los Angeles, and create an enigmatic and effervescent discourse of contemporary California art together in this bright and light-filled space.

Complexities in the ever-changing environment of the City of Angels fuels these four artists as they move through their individual art practices.



           
           
           

Nano Rubio finds inspiration in the interactions of humanity and technology. Rubio is intrigued by the digital age and the constant influx of media in our everyday lives. As more humans are displaced by digital evolution, automation, environmental and political concerns, Rubio’s paintings become more layered and complicated as well—humanity becomes distorted, smeared or buried in the vertices of a haptic flux, much like in reality. As his colors and compositions are alerting and recall digital sensations paired with a painterly touch, Rubio’s work blurs visual landscapes and divisions of space and time while also referencing our contemporary vantage, and embracing our current hustle and bustle. His paintings repurpose the ebb and flow of the summer energy, and interact with the other works on conceptual and visual levels.

Max Presneill utilizes visual redactions to explore his creative spirit. His mixed influences of street art, media, modernist abstraction and radicalism culminate in his work to reference political and social rebellion, but also serve to create a unique perspective on contemporary Los Angeles. Presneill uses many different styles and techniques to colorfully express the active energy and movement that is inherent in timeless rebellion and in city life, but mixes and mingles with the minimalist California “Cool School” style, to find his own visual identity that adds a calming and sensory conversation to the already light and bright dialogue within this grouping of artists.

Jonni Cheatwood works with intuition and direct experience as his biggest motivator for his art practice. Beginning with direct marks, squiggles and interesting shapes and colors, Cheatwood reacts and builds up his compositions over time, working with the painting and the energy of the art-making practice. Accidental, intuitive and calling upon his environment to further stimulate his creativity, Cheatwood creates jarring paintings that also find satisfaction in their fluidity and careful composition. His work begs to interact with its surroundings, and finds a great conversation with the other work in this exhibit, as the light colors, the line work, the occasional lettering and the graffiti-like movement interact with the other artists’ creations as if they were meant to be together.

Jonathan Apgar finds patterning and subtle color play his greatest allies in his creative style. Fixated on the conceptual qualities of abstraction, his work has the ability to evoke strange passageways, cosmic shapes and biological processes within a minimalist viewpoint. Pushing and pulling with spatial perspective, grid-like structures often distress his paradoxical compositions. Embracing mystery and visual shifts, the unknown becomes the focal point in his works, creating ample space to interact with its many possibilities for meaning and its actual surroundings. Apgar is fascinated with the indefinite, and the meditative space in which we can embrace contemplation and competing possibilities in the universe. His work lends a more concrete visual anchor in this exhibit, offering a weight that moves at a different pace than the rest, yet still demands equl attention amongst the conversing works of art.

The exhibit opens on Saturday, July 16, 2016 and is on view through August 19, 2016. Reception is Saturday, July 16, 2016 from 6 - 8pm.