Casper Brindle Radiates Light and Color at Luckman Fine Arts Complex

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If you were to pass from our universe to the next in a sudden flash of light and time, perhaps undergoing this passage through a wormhole, a dream state, or as they used to say on the bridge of the starship Enterprise, at “warp speed,”  you might emerge transcendent, with a strange glow suffusing your vision. Such is the experience of viewing Casper Brindle’s mysteriously sensory art.

In a bravura exhibition at the Luckman Fine Arts Complex at CSULA, curated by Mika Cho, Brindle’s own passage through time, light, and space was on full and radiant display. Ranging from some works earlier in the artist’s career to a full focus on images created in 2021 and largely in 2022, Hypermodality provided a beautifully complete experience of Brindle’s work.

Dimensional images that pulse with color and light and play with perception are the core of Brindle’s work. His aesthetic moves the eye and the mind, vibrating with barely contained motion, hovering like a UFO just outside our peripheral vision. Both galvanizing and meditative, varying in color from vibrant shades to cloud like monochromatic shadows of varying hues, these works create emotional and cognitive leaps for viewers, bounding between shades and shadows, running into the sharp edges of horizon lines or disappearing like the taillights of an interstellar ship traveling an incomprehensible speed into a thick, floating tube.

Beautifully curated across two connected, open, large gallery spaces, wandering through the Hypermodality exhibition, which closed at the Luckman in November, was like floating on a life raft of light. Seeing these images in this serene space, it was possible to take in both the meticulously applied airbrushed layers of paint, the hypnotic quality of Brindle’s use of gradated color and shadow, and the enigmatic glow of the art.

The artist’s most recent work is so luminous that it appears to use external lighting, while in reality using color and texture to create an aura of soft, regenerative light.

Some works seem to bathe the viewer in bioluminescence, pulling the eye into a softly opaque sea or into the center of a soft cloud. Just as a bioluminescent sea shines when disturbed by a breaking wave, these works shimmer as the viewer moves closer or farther from them, whether they are viewed from the side or the center.

Other paintings recall the opalescent glow of a pearl, or the shifting colors and light flares of a fire opal. Indeed, each of these works could be pulled from the sea or the sky, or within a long-buried geode, cracked by time to reveal the shining gems within.

Uniformly, Brindle’s work is a perfect haiku of light, as well as an epic study of how color contains or expresses that light. Each piece tells a story of transformation, of how our vision of the world changes that world; how our eye creates the place in which our hearts and minds dwell, not just geographically but emotionally.

All this in works that are formal and made with careful attention to line, geometric principles, and a cool intensity of mannered shapes and patterns.

With titles that describe light glyphs and portals, it is no wonder that Brindle’s art evokes time travel, the speed of light, powerful entities and spiritual understandings, worlds that exist within or beyond our own comprehension.

An almost-holy simplicity infuses each work, whether created from pigmented formed acrylic or with layered automotive paint and gold leaf on linen. The impressiveness of Brindle’s technique rests in its quiet power, much as does the beauty of a sunset or the flare of a meteor. His art burns with the fire of color, and yet has an icy perfection that evokes a glass prism, capturing color and encapsulating it, allowing it to shift but not fade to black.

Some of the colors are startling: “Light Glyph VF 11” is the fierce cerulean blue of the hydrothermal Sapphire Pool in Yellowstone Natural Park. “Light Glyph VF 13” is the luscious tangerine of a citrus fruit on acid. Just as startling is the softly opalescent gold – with a layered burnt sienna orange bar at the center, or “Light Glyph VF 8.” The artist’s “Light Glyph VF 23” is no less riveting, an orange sun or a work with a softer, blurred orange bar at its center.

While each of these works are created using thick pigmented acrylic, Brindle’s works on linen are no less startling and rich, just differently textured. “Portal Glyph Painting X,” a massive 120 x 120 work using gold leaf and automotive paint on linen is an aqua sea and gilded sunrise with a glowing gold door cracked open just enough to see and allow passage if we dare.

A pair of sensual curves in hot pink wait succulently behind a wider passage in “Portal Glyph Painting III.” In this work, a radiant, slender rectangle of blue and gold light features a dark gold bar at its center, a portal within a portal, perhaps.

Regardless of format, Brindle’s work is above all else alive. It is alive with light, alive with line, holding within its serene and pristine depths a seething, swimming, sensorial swarm of color. If the images deliberately create a sense of the possibility of passage, or entering an “other” realm or experience, then that passage is as the viewer wishes to shape it, leading where the viewer wishes to enter. The artist offers the portal to enter, or the light to step through, but it is up to the viewer to take that step.

One of the finest exhibitions of 2022, Hypermodality commands viewers to take action, to truly see what lies beneath the surface of art, and perhaps, life itself.

– Genie Davis; photos by Rob Brander provided by Luckman Gallery/Mika Cho; additional photos, Genie Davis

Talk of the Trees – Catherine Ruane

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It is an overpoweringly beautiful tree. A tree that has survived storm and history, hurt and war, human suffering and tyranny, the vicissitudes of life itself. Catherine Ruane’s “General Sherman” captures that hard-won grace in a vast work that, at present, arcs from floor to ceiling on the wall of the Yiwei Gallery in Venice.

Ruane’s work, which I’ve previously observed shown in a more horizontal construct at the Brand Gallery some months ago, is an awe-inspiring presence here, as alive in every detailed individual charcoal and graphite leaf as if it grew into this space, creating it’s own forest. The General Sherman’s fraught history aside, the most overpowerfing sensation in observing the artist’s recreation of it is of a blessing – for the continuation of life, the ways in which trees talk to the earth, among themselves, and through their whispered rustlings, to us.

The artist has constructed this beautiful work in multiple layers that evoke those rustlings. She’s described assembling the  large-scale piece as something similar to “creating a paper doll” of massive proportions, with each leaf and limb a separate, delicate piece mounted on the wall, shaping a stunningly dimensional image.

Long a capturer of trees and nature, working at present in primarily the nuances of grey and black, Ruane offers a living world reimagined, a sensorial recreation of the natural one. Also on exhibit among her works are several sepia toned floral images, including the beautiful “Left Behind Rose,” above. The coloration resembles a dried and pressed flower, an old memory preserved.

Along with the multiple works by Ruane in this exhibition, Wanderland’s sweet, contained gallery show also features the work of Lynn Hanson and Elizabeth Orleans. Their work, too, features a peacefully monochromatic color palette, one that dovetails well with Ruane’s lustrously, luminously created flora and fauna. Each artist has shaped an almost mythological sense of meandering through a dream-like, yet resilliant universe in which color lives more in the mind’s eye than in the artworks themselves, rendering them, if possible, even more alive.

Ruane’s massive tree is a seminal work within a group of beautiful works. Don’t miss it.

Yiwei Gallery is located in Venice at 1350 Abbott Kinney; the show runs through early December. Settling in among its branches is highly recommended in our own turbulent times.

  • Genie Davis; photos, Genie Davis

Gold Soul – the Art of Amrta

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Gold is a grand metal, long lasting, luminous, profoundly durable. It is a precious substance. It is mined and treasured, and used to create valuable jewelry and works of art. Emblematic of something even more precious, the resilliance of the human spirit, artist Amrta takes an event that was a negative cataclysm in her life, and reshapes it as a tribute to her own power, her own gold. In disIntegrated  at Shockboxx Gallery in Hermosa Beach,  Amrta offers a moving and utterly beautiful series of work.

As artwork, the show simply dazzles. Rooted in the expression and expulsion of the darkest heart of trauma, its depth is as rich as its visual surface. Along with the individual paintings, Amrta offers a swirling, galvanizing video dance performance; evocative poetry accompanying each work; and a visceral, heart-hurting series of exhibits in the backroom that explore the traumatic event that led to the creation of this work. The expression “spinning gold from dross” has never been more true.

The work is multi-layered and complex, with the bottom, virtually unseen layer adding textures and a swirl of emotions, with the occasional brief excavatory revelation to the careful viewer. It is dark, that layer, indicative of all the stress and trauma Amrta overcame to reach the point of creating this evocative series of artworks. The final layer is the astonishing gold, each piece of art an individual, some more bronze in color, some light; some with delicate floral drawings on them; some with thick markings beneath the gold that remind the viewer of a geographic map, or emotional Braille.

If we do indeed negotiate our deepest fears, darkest emotions and situations in the midnight of our souls and hearts, then, forged by these experiences, it is our choice whether to blacken with them or become purer, more golden, like a stormy riven sky after the sunset. It is enormously clear the path Amrta has taken, and it is a glowing one.

It is also a valuable one to peruse.  Treasure yourself, viewers, heart and soul, and revel in this stunningly original artistic reminder that what glitters here is indeed pure gold.

While closed in-person at Shockboxx Gallery in Hermosa Beach, the exhibition is up on Artsy and you should mine t’s lush and passionate images now.

  • Genie Davis ; photos Genie Davis and also provided by the gallery

Come to Lake LA with Daniela Garcia Hamilton

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Offering a rich and evocative, deeply personal look at life in Antelope Valley’s Lake Los Angeles, Daniela Garcia Hamilton takes viewers with her on a visit to Sundays in Lake LA.

The exhibition is a warm, visually lovely body of work which focuses on Garcia Hamilton’s childhood, as well as on the idea of what makes the idea of “home “- a home. The images seem bathed in a sunny, Southern California light, one washed with a soft patina from the dusty high desert landscape of the town.

Paintings depict the artist’s extended family at gatherings, and the nature of her family home as a safe space for children and other family members when first arrived from Mexico.

Infused in color, a brightness that is resonant and uncompromising, this is narrative painting at its finest, infused with the refined story telling of memory. Because of that infusion, these works are galvanizing. While the art itself is graceful, even languid and dream-like, the depictions of everyday life and the profound meaning those small, perfect slices of existence make are quite visceral. Poignant, hopeful, and masterfully painted, in a lush style that is nonetheless vividly realistic,  Garcia Hamilton takes us on a journey in which we are all travellers through the intimate migration that is life itself.

In “Hasta aqui llegamos, gracias a tí pa (Thank you dad, we made it this far), we see the artist’s father looking slightly upward, as if toward dreams for the future – the future of the child in his arms and the child seated next to him.

“In Between” takes viewer and artist on a more fraught journey toward the future, with a young child kneeling on a serape, a toy truck by her side, a dog in front of her. She is clearly a traveller, undoubtably crossing the border from Mexico to the U.S., but also crossing a different sort of border, from childhood to adulthood. The toy truck she plays with has become a real truck containing her on her journey north.

“Ofrendas de fronteras” or “Border offerings” seems an even harder journey, as wrapped in a serape, a boy lies sprawled over what could be a field of flowers and plants; a woman curled at his side, discarded toys beneath and behind him, as if this passage –  with the image of a wall at the left bottom of the canvas – was particularly difficult, a passage in which the innocence of childhood was left behind in a quest for survival beyond that wall.

Repeated subjects appear in various works, such as dogs, children, colorful serapes and cloths; while each are unique, they shape a connected story of childish innocence and joy, growth, and a vision of a brighter future despite the difficult journeys in which the subjects arrived in Lake LA. Now that they are here, they were seemingly born to move into the dry high desert light and infuse it with their own bright hopes.

Also repeated throughout the exhibition are elaborate, colorful patterns as backdrop for these works.  The patterns are used as wall paper, shadows, floor tiles, carpet patterns, all an intricate and delicate lace that recalls papel picado or perforated paper, the traditional decorative craft banenrs created by cutting precise designs into thin paper sheets. The decoration is often used for parties and celebrations such as birthdays, Christmas, and Dia de los Muertos.

In this art, the celebration is based on homecoming, and the formation of a home, a family, a life in a new land. Forged in the fire of difficulties, Garcia Hamilton’s family shapes a solid, lasting bond between past and future, Mexico and America, the old and the new. That bond is as eternal as an unshakable faith in a better future, a child’s promise, familial love.

Visit Garcia Hamilton’s rewarding family of art at Luna Anais at the IVAN Gallery, located at 2709 S Robertson Blvd. In the back, the studio work of resident artist Barbara Mendes should also captivate.

Garcia Hamilton will be conducting an Artist Walkthrough at noon on Saturday, 11/12; the exhibition closes on November 18th. Don’t miss.

  • Genie Davis; photos by Genie Davis and provided by the Luna Anais.