Ali Smith / Christopher Davison

Mark Moore Gallery (new location), Culver City

"Flip Side" presents new large-scale paintings by Smith, she constructs elaborate micro and macrocosms through a delicate balance of chance and intention-simulating the complex balance found in organic structures. "Jackanapes" features a selection of Davison's trademark small paintings and new several large-scale works.

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Mark Moore Gallery proudly presents an exhibition of ambitious new large-scale paintings by Ali Smith, making for her second major solo show with the gallery. Smith constructs elaborate micro and macrocosms through a delicate balance of chance and intention- simulating the complex balance found in organic structures. Often drawing from studies on paper and collages to create her large-scale compositions, Smith has continued to evolve her idiosyncratic, highly personal language of motifs and forms that are at once fluid and open.

Historically, Smith's elaborate undulations at once recall the whimsy of Gaudi architecture, the romance of Baroque ornamentation, and the intricacy of Art Nouveau. In Flip Side, she allows her canvases to evolve and unfold over time – the compositions vying for space within kaleidoscopic dimensionality and inversion of planes. With her emblematic vibrant palette, she manipulates jarring angles, soft curves and intricate nooks to unearth abstract terrains and surreal forms. Oftentimes, the fragmented forms collide and layer against a deep space, forming puzzle-like composites of the paint's diverse malleability. Smith's inquisitiveness about awkward and unexpected beauty becomes manifest in richly hued steeples, veins, scales and tendrils of lavish paint, which converge into alluringly obscure and impetuous anatomies. Her simultaneously calculated and uninhibited investigation of equilibrium is parallel to that of her medium, and forges an optic tension that is both unsettling and seductive in its enigmatic composition.

Simultaneously, the gallery announces an inaugural solo show of new works by painter Christopher Davison in the Project Room; an exhibition that will also act as Davison's first one-person exhibition in Los Angeles. Featuring a selection of Davison's trademark small paintings, Jackanapes will also debut several large-scale works; a significant departure for the artist.

Mining the subconscious for evocative imagery, Davison meanders through garish dreamscapes rife with fantasy, phantasmagoria and myth. He seamlessly entwines delicate ink lines with pools of dense gouache to create compositions versed in both printmaking and painting; a hazy ambiguity also articulated through his sundry figuration. With a single work's infrastructure encompassing as many as twenty-five other original compositions, Davison's creations are as layered as the stratums of his source material. Fragments of primitivism, realism and absurdism are wed in a visual stream of consciousness that spans the graphic surrealism of Odilon Redon and the playful non-sequiturs of Max Ernst. In exploring the sublime depths of the latent mind, Davison demonstrates a contemporary mastery of synesthesia that grapples with intrinsic desire, terror, hope and lust in its most primal forms - a Rimbaudian narrative that celebrates the nonsensical allure of human psychology and mortality.

Image: Ali Smith

Opening Reception: February 25, 6-8pm

Mark Moore Gallery
5790 Washington Boulevard - Culver City
Gallery Hours: Tuesday - Saturday 11-6, and by appointment daily
Free admission

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Mark Moore Gallery (new location)

IN ARCHIVIO [9]

Allison Schulnik
dal 25/5/2012 al 6/7/2012