Diversions LA

With vivid colors and shapes, artist Robert Soffian moves nimbly between the figurative and the abstract. His paintings have a sense of drama, a fluidity of emotion that is perhaps unsurprising given his past work in theater, directing, and lighting.

Many works vibrate like a freeze-frame in a film, as in his recent “Justice,” dye, oil, and mixed media on panel. Here Soffian has created a large-scale work with faces, figures, and what resemble tribal masks. With a bright yellow at the bottom of the work and flame red at the top as background, the painting feels like a sunset on fire, with justice perhaps not so much blind as blinded by the light, color, and longing around her. His works have an element of the surreal as well as the abstract, with a movement toward the more figurative in his most recent works.

Another recent work, “Chapel Repaired,” an oil that is a vast 80” by 60”, resembles stained glass as folk art or mosaic, and without identifying them as such, here are saints and icons and fertility symbols, here is the Rothko chapel completely revisited.

“Freedom of Movement” is something else again – the words ‘please’ and ‘help’ and dark brown colors separated with a grid or fencing from a blue sea and gold sky upon which face/forms look like skulls. This is perhaps a border crossing of the spirit, or a dividing line among souls. 

Entirely abstract is the oil, dye, gouache, ink and pastels on panel that is “kickriver,” reminiscent of Matisse.

But above all, through all, it is color that maps the way to the heart of Soffrian’s work.

“I wish to paint things we all know or dream…very often I am first motivated by the excitement of the materials I am using…obviously I enjoy vibrant colors, and the texture of the physical body of the paint…” he relates.

Soffian says he moves in contrast as well as color, and that he can sense the shape of color itself.  He uses phrases in describing his work in which he says that when he paints figures they have colored shapes and that he can sense the shape of color, even eat it. These are interesting words indeed when viewing his work, because there is a sense of the color even devouring his figures and forms. There is a deeply visceral quality to his work, something that the eye absorbs and the retains, almost as if it were printed on the mind.

Currently residing in Los Angeles after spending many years in Northern California, the artist has also traveled extensively, and remarks on the fact that for him, every place he’s visited has had a “special light.” Along with color, it is the quality of light, an inward to outward glow that is riveting about Soffian’s work. Again, knowing the artist’s background, it is easy to see that sense of drama in his works, and that the color and the light within it is the palette of the theatrical.

above, “Spine of the Matter”

Works on paper such as “3 Fish Friends” – which almost swims before the eye, shadings of watery blue in the background, and fish whose scales almost dance with a sort of imagined iridescence, the way sunlight can make the scales on living fish go silver and rainbow – are delicate and dreamlike. Witness “Spine of the Matter,” ink, graphite, pastels, and crayon on rice paper, in which a central image of a spine –which could also be a bamboo branch – is surrounded by dark matter that could be a vision from an X-ray, all against a background of golden shades. Or “Blake Struts,” ink, gouache, and mixed media in a rainbow of colors, faces and bodies and letters, clouded abstractions, an almost alchemical mixture, something magical and shamanistic.

With work that is entirely original, yet evokes connections to Matisse and Chagall – especially, perhaps Chagall, Soffian’s paintings are both mysterious and familiar, in motion and motionless.

• Genie Davis; Photos: Robert Soffian,  Shoebox PR