An Artist Who Matters: Hung Viet Nguyen Coming to Matter Gallery

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Opening December 8th at Matter Gallery in mid-city, Hung Viet Nguyen’s Chances Matter is a dazzling new body of work,  his first in which the human figure plays a central part in his highly textured, immersive landscapes. The exhibition marks a new direction for the artist. While continuing his masterful work in oil and palette knife, building up and manipulating his paint as if sculpting it, he now paints human subjects with a greater emphasis. The new prominence of humans speaks to both our coexistence in and joy of nature, but also to our effect upon it, from climate change to a self-absorption with our cell phones that may preclude the ability to be one with the natural environment around us.

When adding the human figure into the pristine yet entirely alive natural landscapes that he paints, Nguyen reveals that he’s not judging the intervention of humans – that judgment resides with viewers. He fully embraces the idea that while we can never regret experiencing beauty, we cannot control the outcome of our experience of it, one which affects not only us personally, but nature itself.

In “Hot Springs Bathers,” the human figures remain oblivious to jet trails in the sky that could represent wildly increased travel or an on-coming war. Above these floats what could be another view of the earth as if seen from a 360-degree perspective looking backwards, or another planet falling from the sky, also blissfully ignored by the human figures below.  Startlingly vivid colors and the dichotomy of tranquility with possibly ominous outcomes creates a visceral tension in the work.

Likewise, Nguyen’s “Tomorrow Won’t Be the Same,” above, fully embraces a belief he expresses that change will come, regardless of the hour, for good or ill. Here we see viewers taking a selfie in front of a beautiful waterfall, obliviously standing near a growing crack in the ground.

“Eclipse” shows the sun nearly fully occluded by the moon, leaving a stunning Ring of Fire. Below this astonishing spectacle, two women and a man, mostly naked, relax on the grass, cell phones in hand, small parts of the cosmic show.

 

In “Self-Baptism,” the human figure is what draws the viewer most fully. This figure wears a blue scarf as she enters the water of a flower-ringed, steaming spring. 

Although many settings in Nguyen’s new series are inspired by locations such as Iceland and the greater Mammoth Lakes area, “Journey Through Dry Lake” was inspired by the desert terrain of the Salton Sea. Here the human subject is carrying a boat across a dry lakebed speckled with dead fish; the artist’s “Contemplating,” below, reveals a man holding a stick against his shoulders behind his head, a position of relaxation that also recalls the crucifixion; sacrifice and acceptance in this pose.

While each of the above works are large, there are a range of smaller artworks as well, many featuring Nguyen’s arched gates, waterfalls, and snowy mountains, each perfectly rendered. He is also including a series of images created in tins, displayed as if they were open lockets; many which feature more of this evocative human subjects.

Do be sure to catch this meaningful show – your chance to see it matters!

Matter Studio Gallery is located at 5080 W. Pico Boulevard LA, CA 90019. The exhibition will be up through January the 5th.
Opening reception: December 8, 2024 4-8 PM; artist talk December 22, 2024 2-4 PM; closing reecption January 5, 2025 4-6 PM
The regular hours for tis show are Friday 4-6 PM; Saturday and Sunday 12-6 PM; also available for viewing by appointment.

  • Genie Davis; photos – Genie Davis and as provided by the artist

 

Catch the Glow at MOAH Cedar with Luminous Mysteries/Human Symmetries

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Making his debut solo museum exhibition at MOAH Cedar, Nikolas Soren Goodich weaves complex glowing stories that mix light, vivid color, and symbolic abstraction. Creating works that both literally and figuratively glow, the artist’s Luminous Mysteries/Human Symmetries combine a sense of both dream and reality.

The museum show offers an encompassing look at the artist’s work, and provides an immersive walk-through of images that seem to move with the viewer’s eye. The illuminated effects of Goodich’s art make many of his works feel wildly alive.

Particularly impressive are his large scale works “Luminous Mysteries/Human Symmetries Ground One and Ground Two”.  This  two-sided work is kiln-fired glass paint on tempered glass and acrylic on plexiglass in an aluminum frame.  Mysteriously embedded LED lights and a transformer make the pieces pop to neon shades; the sunshine of an amber and gold palette blazes to the eye.

His work flows and spins, both captivating and startling the viewer in its vivid coloration and intricacy. Some works are only layers of plexiglass, others are plexiglass panels layered onto canvas.  Some are more figurative, such as the twinned red faces in “Untitled New Psychedelic Diptych” and “Humananimal 1.”  “Doppelganger” in another dazzler, an acrylic on plexiglass work with embedded LED lights.

Some works include both Goodich’s painting and printmaking techniques. His process takes the different surfaces of plexiglass and kiln-fired glass into account, making fine use of both the reflective surfaces and their transparency as well as how they fuse with light.

These are fierce, smart images that feature bold color. He applies colors directly onto the surface of one glass panel and hand monoprints onto the next, creating images that seem to be woven together, fluid yet geometric; layered not just in paint but in light. The experience of viewing many of these images, whether they contain embedded LEDs or they do not, is as if light was stitched in between the layers.

He has described his paintings as touching upon physics, biology, chemistry, geography, consciousness, and philosophy. It’s his wish to make his work healing, both in the visual and emotional sense. He himself has healed from a harsh past, but is still reflective of that journey.  As an artist, it’s the resilience and fragility of the human spirit, the wisdom of self-reflection, and his own emergence as if from a chrysallis of pain into his life as an artist. This metaphor is often present in works that feature a butterfly-like, twinned/winged image.

In fact, his personal path is entwined with his artwork,  and just as his own difficult personal trajectory has changed, the art itself can seem mutable, depending upon the environment in which they are located, as well as the time of day in which they are viewed, shifting one’s experience of them. He notes that his own layering of glass interacts with space and light – as well as with the mood of a space of the mood of the viewer.

While the inner glow of these works is manifest at MOAH Cedar, it is perhaps even more stunning outdoors in an installation at Palm Desert’s Melissa Morgan Fine Arts. Viewing his work at both locations fully explores Goodich’s own perception of art as mirroring the internal and external at work in all of us, with the figurative represented in the portraiture embedded in his work, and the abstract, also vitally present in his work, and perhaps more aligned with our own inchoate spirituality.

Goodich’s personal history, both culturally and racially as Black and Jewish,  his survival of the trauma of addiction and homelessness, and his personal resurrection as an artist is certainly one part of his art. But he extrapoloates forward into broader questions of justice, identity, toxicity, and healing — with the cure to all the world’s ills, as well as his own personal past darkness, being light.

The 22 works at MOAH Cedar, all created within the last five years, are truly reflective: of light, the magic of simply being alive, and how we see ourselves and others. They are mirrors of the artist’s psyche, of our own, and of the environment. Presented at the museum as a collection of two series of work,  Double Inverted Portraits and Luminous Symmetries, both are transformative and alchemic.

As noted,  Goodich’s large scale two-sided edge-lit public artwork, “Luminous Mysteries Human Symmetries Ground Two,” is on permanent display in Palm Desert. Both high and low desert destinations are well worth a drive to feel the Goodrich glow.

The MOAH Cedar exhibition runs through November 24th with an artist’s talk with critic and curator Shana Nys Dambrot on November 16th at 2 p.m.

The installation at Melissa Morgan Fine Art is positioned permanently.

  • Genie Davis; photos provided by the artist and Laura Grover; additional images by Genie Davis

Visionary Delight: The Images of Carl Baratta – A World in Both Plein Air and Fantastical Landscapes

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Carl Baratta is a brilliant contradiction as an artist: he creates hauntingly evocative black and white work as well as vibrantly colored paintings that recall the palette of Matisse. But regardless of palette or medium, he is above all else a storyteller, offering exciting, inventive, and immersive tales, wonderful visual puzzles for viewers to piece together through their own individual lens.

His vivid painted landscapes are both intensely alien and recognizable, like a jungle in the Amazon transplanted to Southern California.

Some are whimsical, like the friendly creatures and spotted trees in work like “The Tuneless Song of the Ancient Machine.”

Others are more realistic, even in palette, as in the watery scape of “Wrecked 2,” in which an imploring hand adds a touch of the surreal as it rises to the side of a motion-filled scene of flowing aqua-blue water and tumbled brown rock.

He works in acrylic and resin on canvas, or watercolor on paper, or mixes acrylic with watercolor, or watercolor with tempura. His energetic use of color and line form a rhythm that pull the viewer into his world, dream-like and fecund, rich with image and imagination.

Water, forest, and flower are his main characters. In “The Evil Tree of the Naked Heart,” trees like yellow bananas emerge from a lush tropical green forest,  while a blanket of red with protruding golden plants floats above a tangle of roots or branches in another work, white waves flowing in the foreground.

The overall vibe of all Baratta’s color work is of a visionary landscape, a world imprinted just beneath that which most of us see, with the dullness of the everyday stripped away, leaving behind a fantastical dream state.

Of course, it would be a mistake to look at only the artist’s full color works. His monochrome drawings are equally pulsing with story, life, and a compelling inner reality. “La Pipe Creep,” a recent graphite on paper image, features a semi-circle of people surrounded by a sky dominated with massive curls of smoke exuding from one man’s pipe.

His wildly wooded landscape in “The Once Lovers” dominates the center of a beautifully shaded monochrome landscape, with a man hurrying off to the left, while a woman follows far to the right – a story of two people far apart in this tangled wood, yet still heading in the same direction.

Baratta also frequently draws and paints plein air impressions, as in the delicate pastel colors barely there in a black and white world, in the lovely “Berlin Forest, Hollywood Hills Heading North.”

He also creates a kind of instant folklore in black and white woodblock prints, such as in the “The Alphabet Found in Stones,” in which a bird perches on a branch, below it a nest with another bird on the edge.

The intricately detailed woodblock print “Awake, Awake, Deborah: Awake, Awake, Utter a Song!” has at its center a perfectly rendered arched brick bridge, but the soul of the piece is the floating visage of a woman against the sky.

His artistic storytelling knows no bounds, from references to Norse mythology to Sienese gothic style. And no matter the medium, so much heart fills this artist’s work that it seems to overflow, whether working in the most brilliant of acrylic hues on an other-worldly landscape, shaping evocative graphite sketches, or painting lightly colored plein air landscapes. In each image, Baratta exudes a deep joy in being alive, and in sharing his lovely, unique vision of the world.

If his work as an artist wasn’t enough, he spreads the same kind of exuberant, slightly surreal joy in his curations and through large-scale exhibitions that surround viewers with a sense of fun and mystery in the familiar. In High Beams, an on-going series of exhibitions held in parking lots and roof-tops, members of different art collectives and galleries offer inventive, themed work in robust, massive pop-up settings. As a member of Tiger Strikes Asteroid Los Angeles, he also organizes gallery exhibitions in multiple cities globally through the TSLA network, and B-LA Connect.

Watching Baratta’s visual stories unfold in any way at all, you’ll enter an entirely new realm vibrating with a passion of life and art. It’s a great deal of fun to be privileged to step inside.

  • Genie Davis; photos: Genie Davis; and as provided by Carl Baratta

Between the Figurative and the Abstract – Margaret Lazzari at Billis Williams

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The object of art is not to reproduce reality, but to create a reality of the same intensity.

                                                                                                                                                Alberto Giacometti

Margaret Lazzari’s recently closed compelling solo exhibit The Space of Color at the Billis Williams Gallery showcases mysterious paintings that exist in the space between figuration and abstraction. These works are psychologically disorienting as Lazzari plays with the viewers expectations of spatial relationships.

A case in point is Autumn 2024, where sky and fall foliage appear to be reflected in a shimmering watery surface. At the same time, in the lower right corner, a dark shadow appears both on the surface but also like a hole disrupting the picture plane.  It speaks to what may be lurking underneath. The title may be a clue to the meaning and context of the piece. Autumn is a transitional time from the carefree days of summer to a frigid winter and functions as a poignant metaphoric allusion to the later stages of one’s life.

Tantalizing ambiguity abounds in Lazzari’s glorious paintings and is evident in the operatic, visually stunning painting entitled Venus 2023. The surface here crackles with heat and energy. The flickering brushstrokes climb up the canvas like flames reaching for the sky and the sublime, highly saturated color dazzles. The title suggests the heat and passion of erotic love but in this age of wildfires, this intensely beautiful work looks like a dangerous conflagration reminding one of the dangers of climate change.

Then, as if to soothe the soul, there is the stunning painting, The Calm, 2024 with its dramatic deep horizon, orange-tinged sky flowing towards the viewer and smooth, watery surface reflecting swirling clouds. This work channels the sublime landscape painting of the nineteenth century Romantic painters that focused on emotion, evoked by the wonders of nature.

Lazzari is a masterful colorist whose brushstrokes and mark making are robust, varied and vigorous, creating engaging paintings that play with the viewer’s sense of space, orientation and emotions.

  • Nancy Kay Turner; photos by Nancy Kay Turner and as provided by the gallery