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

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

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

Carved Slices Up Artistic Halloween Fun at Descanso Gardens

Carved at Descanso Gardens has created a gently haunted, transcendent Halloween-time experience this year, with a fresh route, hand-carved wooden spirit creatures created by Chainsaw Jenna, and more of the large, crazy-cool pumpkins visitors have come to know and love.

The garden setting is lovely and the lighting sets the mood for glowing, spooky fun.

The charming new Descanso Railroad is playfully aglow; Rhizome, an installation from Tom and Lien Dekyvere offers mesmerizing, futuristic beams of light.

And of course there are the ever changing – because they only last three days – carved pumpkins to delight young and old. The artists creating them are ready to chat about their unique designs from Beetlejuice to Pikachu.

Then there’s the delightfully haunting pumkin trail, where pumpkin sculptures offer a mix of toothy grins,  and fierce gazes.  There are pumpkin-headed scarecrows, and pumpkin families as well as a purple-lit, water based installation that depicts a storm tossed and tattered ghostly pirate ship, rainstorm periodically descending over it.

A pumpkin–filled mesh dragon shifts colors with cast light in another water spot; glowing red lanterns illuminate a tunnel in the Japanese Garden.

The garden’s tree forest features illuminated bases with touch pads that emanate spooky sounds when trod upon.

 

Wire figures of ghostly boys and girls are positioned eerily in the rose garden.

Even the parking lot attendant’s booth gets into the spirit of the event, with a jaunty skeleton ticket taker pointing the way to the entrance.

The whole event is original and delightful, and has grown exponentially in both size and charm since its first years. This is a don’t- miss for families and those who like their Halloween thrills compelling but not filled with jump-scares;  haunting in a mist-shrouded, purple-lit, leave-it-to-your imagination way.

There’s also a pumpkin house photos stop, a beer garden, snacks, coffee – and hot chocolate, and delicious cupcakes, cookies and pastries alluringly near the pumpkin carvers.

The event is open from now until October 30th. Ticket discounts for members. Non-members will pay a well-worth-it $35-45 for adults and $25-30 for kids.

Hours are 6-10 pm, with timed admissions at 6, 6:30 7, 7:30, 8, 8:30, and 9 p.m.

  • Genie Davis; photos: Genie Davis and Jack Burke

Blandine Saint-Oyant Surges With Color

Awash in color and geometric patterns, Blandine Saint-Oyant’s This Is It, now at Gallery 825 in West Hollywood, combines a mix of spray painted lines, riveting colors, and varied gemoetric shapes both cut out and drawn. Her vibrant geometry sings, just as her pallette resonates with chromatic intensity.

Saint-Oyant says she uses a painting process that she’s developed over a period of the last 15-20 years to create this visually galvanizing work. “I pour liquid oil paint on a painted background on canvas or paper. When I pour different batches of colored paint and rotate the canvas back and forth, the pigments intermingle into visually striking patterns and shapes.”

It’s an alchemic process that allows for a fusion of the planned and the experimental..”Things happen when the colors mix and shapes form,” she relates, calling her work often improvisational. “I like the fluid and organic result.”

However, her work in This is It is a progression from her past work and processes. She considers it to be a transitional show that includes her large titular painting, which stands at an impressive 58″ by 70″, a series of paintings that are 38″ x 38″ called “Ecclectics,” and two smaller framed collages that she titles “Misfits.”

All of this work is an outgrowth of what she terms a “gloomy two year period” during the pandemic. “This is It” was set to be her last painting ever, she explaints. “This painting was a first for me in all aspects, technically and conceptually. It was the first time that I included painted letters and used so many straight lines and gradations of colors. It was a difficult piece that took me several months to complete. But this long process gave me with the time to think about the next phase.”

Despite her decision to be done with painting, after completing the ambitious “This is It,” she found she had a strong urgency to create new work. “I began working on a series of collages. My intention was not to restrict myself to one single technique or range of colors but to explore and juxtapose them as freely and unconventionally as possible, in a completely eclectic manner,” she says.

With this in mind, she combined “geometric and organic shapes, cut out and drawn lines, gradations of colors, and the use of spray paint to provide a strong new element. I call the collage series ‘The Misfits,’ and two are in this show. ”

These images, shown above,  are precise and fluid, the textures popping out of their vivid backgrounds, creating an astonishingly tactile and meaningful 3-D effect. There is a liquidity to both works, as if a splash or drops of water were caught in time and added to the layered collage.

Her work with collage led her to create her newest body of work,  her series “The Ecclectics,” below, which she developed using planned geometric shapes that she juxtaposes to one another.  This pre-planning differentiates her work in this exhibition from previous projects. “What makes these paintings different from my other work is the addition of free-floating spray-painted lines, patterned geometric shapes, and an adventurous color range that I have not used before,” she attests.

Each of these works once again exhibits a rich texturality that captures movement both in line and through color gradations. The paintings are like watching the shifting contours and colors of a sunset sky,  but instad of those colors changing due to the passage of time, they shift from engaging in deeper contemplation of the works, which manifest light and shadow in varied strands to create a sense of luminosity and depth.

Saint-Oyant continues to work with oils, drawn to the range of color and the infinite subtleties of color that oil offers her. She describes the medium as providing her with a “greater range” of color and texture than acrylic or other mediums.

Despite having once considered putting painted work aside, she finds that painting today is “still an exciting and innovative medium that has a lot to offer. I want my work to make people curious and inquisitive,” she says. “Painting is an adventurous endeavor that I will always pursue. For me it is a way to answer existential questions, to fully express myself in a completely personal and independent way. I am currently working on a series that I call ‘Les Sauvages’, which is more gestural and expressionist. “

The exhibition is on view at LAAA’s Gallery 825, located at 825 N. La Cienega in West Hollywood, through October 18th.

Along with Saint-Oyant’s lush work, also on view are three other solo exhibitions: Lousine Hogtanian’s Inside Out; Lori Markman’s Magical Landscapes; and Laura Van Duren’s Revelers.

  • Genie Davis; images provided by the artist