PETER LODATO: DIAMONDS/DIVISIONS/VOIDS - Exhibition Catalog Now Available

Santa Monica, CA - William Turner Gallery is pleased to present, solo exhibition of exceptional new works by Peter Lodato, opening  January 13th, 2024. 

Peter Lodato’s (b. 1946) artistic journey reflects an evolution, from immersive light installations, to captivating paintings that explore the complexities of human perception over the course of his six decade-long career. In addition, Lodato would himself influence a number of artists, teaching Art History at Art Center in Pasadena, and University of California Irvine with notable students such as James Turrell and Chris Burden.

His initial foray into art consisted of environmental light installations,  characteristic of the West Coast's Light and Space movement in the 1960’s, which sought to transform physical spaces into immersive experiences for viewers. He credits the Roman Pantheon’s oculus for his interest in interpreting his experience. This body of work led to his inclusion in the 1981 Whitney Biennial.

As Lodato transitioned back to painting, he carried forward his fascination with perception, creating works that initially appear as austere, geometric abstractions but upon closer inspection, reveal layers, brushstrokes, and vibrant colors that play with space and depth. The dichotomy of vision—its capacity to both reveal and conceal—serves as a thematic cornerstone in Lodato's artistry. His reductive compositions, often featuring divided forms and bold colors, engage viewers in a visual dialogue between simplicity and complexity. Inspired by the Abstract Expressionist’s Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman, Lodato's use of vertical bands of color draws viewers into the canvas, inviting them to experience the artwork both physically and transcendentally. Hard edges feather out into diaphanous atmospheric vapors, creating luminous, Color-field suspensions floating on a colored ground– the formal consequences appear to both recede and project, dematerializing the art object and simultaneously constructing a void of flat, hard-edge, matted pigment. The artists hand is evident in the textural materialization of paint executed with an expert hand. In reasserting the picture plane in favor of the flat form, the abstractions are not in fact “subjectless”, regardless of their  reductive nature, they are intended to elicit a deep emotional response and expose the paradoxical nature of human perception.   

Informed in part by Eastern philosophy, Lodato’s palette observes the color schema assigned to the various corporeal chakras and their corresponding color assignments. Red for example symbolizes the root chakra at the base of the spine, characterizing strength and vitality, whilst white on the other end of the spectrum, illustrates the crowning light of spiritual wisdom.    

Lodato holds a Graduate degree from California State University. His artistic contributions have been recognized through a solo retrospective curated by the Frederick Weisman Foundation (2000), and exhibitions at prestigious institutions such as PS1 in New York City (1978), Whitney Museum of American Art’s Biennial (1981), the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. His works grace esteemed collections in various public and private institutions, including the Brooklyn Museum, the Seattle Art Museum, the Dallas Museum of Art, and the San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art. This extensive presence in renowned collections underscores the impact and significance of Lodato's artistic vision within the realm of contemporary art. He lives and works in Venice, California.

ART REVIEW - White Hot Magazine / Andy Moses: Recent Paintings

By LORIEN SUÁREZ-KANERVA September 11, 2023

Andy Moses’ Recent Paintings will be showcased at the William Turner Gallery in Los Angeles from September 9 until November 11, 2023. Moses Recent Paintings’ distinct color use encompasses a predominantly white, blue, black and gold palette. All-white color tints, shades, and their lustrous variability are at play amidst clear, sharper, fluid lines, and softer open gradations, leading toward ethereal spaces. Moses’s sensibility spans a buoyantly luminous subtlety and achieves a refined definition through a meticulously grounded and richly orchestrated embodied perception. Maurice Merleau-Ponty pointed to embodied perception as the experience of the self in an environment at the crucible towards forms of relatedness that reveal meaning and expand perception.  

Geomorphology 1607, Acrylic on canvas, over concave wood panel, 57 x 90 inches, 2023

Fiber Birren, Johannes Itten, and Carl Jung address the subject of color each through a psychological vantage point, cultural nuances (like Jung’s groundbreaking study of mandalas of the East by introducing these to the West), and Color Theory. The sensorial effects of color suggest a responsive universality based on similarities that bridge cultural bounds.  In his works “Color and Meaning” and “Color and Culture,” John Cage supports these observations on color's meaningful effect on sensorial understanding across cultures.   Most salient in Moses’ works is the combination of white and blue, where black shifts through a reflective play with light toward shades of blue. From these earlier scholars' observations, colors such as whites speak of clarity, illumination, and spirituality, and blues inspire serene tranquility and introspective depth.

As a countertone, gold's earliest cultural associations with the sun's radiant power extend the hue's significance to encompass wealth and prominence. For Jung, gold represented the self's individuation process, stimulating wisdom and enlightenment—likewise, Itten and Birren associated illumination and divine inspiration with gold. Extensively, gold in East Asia, including Japanese 18th-century iconography, signifies wealth, power, good fortune, and divinity.

Geomorphology 1606, Acrylic on canvas over concave wood panel, 57 x 90 in, 2023

Moses shares the American Transcendentalists’ numinously intuitive perception of nature alongside the critical figures of Thoreau, Whitman, Emmerson, and their predecessor, the Canadian Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Poetry such as Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s lines from his poem “The Tide Rises, The Tide Falls” are evident in Moses’ paintings, and they highlight a kinship, reveling in transcendental sensibilities grounded in the human experience of nature and its patterns throughout time.

 “The little waves, with their soft, white hands,
Efface the footprints in the sands.”

Geodesy 1514, Acrylic on canvas over circular wood panel, 72 in diameter, 2023 

Longfellow summarizes this generational contribution towards a deepening receptiveness and recognition of how these contemplations become influential legacies in his poem “A Psalm of Life.”

“Lives of great men all remind us.
We can make our lives sublime,
And, departing, leave behind us
Footprints in the sands of time.”

Geodesy 1515, Acrylic on canvas over circular wood panel, 72 in diameter, 2023

Similarly, Moses perceived an affinity and kinship from the East with Ryukyuan lacquerware for its craftsmanship and conceptual design motif through his introduction while viewing LACMA’s “The Five Directions: Lacquer from the Ryukyu Islands” exhibition. This iconography and the craft itself of creating a painstaking layering of resin polished into lacquer was characteristic of Japan’s Ryukyu Islands from the 18th century.  The motif speaks of benevolent mystical forms seeking wisdom in East Asian cultural iconography. One particular piece in LACMA’s exhibition, a circular tray, inspired his painting titled Geodesy 1515. The matter of the enlightenment is also poetically crafted as an adornment – Dragons Chasing the Flaming Pearl. The Flaming Pearl holds as its essence the themes of wisdom within a spiritual scope. At the same time, the dragons culturally appear as strong protective forms that control natural elements.

Circular Tray with Dragons Chasing a Flaming Pearl, Black Lacquer on Wood Core with Mother of Pearl Inlay, 3.5 x 35.25 in, Ryukyu Islands, 1700-1800, LACMA Permanent Collection.

The American transcendentalist ethos, presented in the poem “Come, said my soul” by Whitman, attests eloquently to their literary movements’ vision of universal unity.  Their writings draw deeply from their dedicated contemplation and communion with nature. This is akin to the sensibility the mystics have shared throughout time.

Geomorphology 1608, Acrylic on canvas over concave wood panel, 57 x 90 in, 2023

“Come, said my soul,
Such verses for my body let us write, (for we are one,)
That should I after death invisibly return,
Or, long, long hence, in other sphere,
There to some group of mates the chants resuming,
(Tallying earth’s soil, trees, winds, tumultuous waves,)
Ever with pleas’d smile I may keep on, Ever and ever yet the verses
owning – as, first, I here and now,
Singing for soul and body, set to them by name,
Walt Whitman

Andy Moses’s paintings attest to this universal transcendence, poetically defined, and breathtakingly revealing its cultural lineage’s kinship. WM

PRESS: LA WEEKLY - MEET LIGHT FIELDS PAINTER CASPER BRINDLE

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MEET LIGHT FIELDS PAINTER CASPER BRINDLE

Abstract painter Casper Brindle renders pure color in aerated layers that capture and refract light, creating breath and a sense of motion with their awe-inspiring luminosity. Heartily influenced by the legacy of the Light and Space movement—which embraced the qualities of wonder in newfangled materials like resin and airbrush, as well as the imagination-fueling advances in interstellar travel—Brindle updates that art historical framework with a modern-day love of the surf and car cultures of his Los Angeles youth. Using automotive paint to enhance that space-age shine as well as an elusive sense of nostalgia in the super-charged palette, Brindle layers delicate coats which seem to capture light in between—later to release it to viewers in an eternal glow. Seeming to change as the viewer moves past them, and carrying the illusion of distant horizons or doors (of perception) as a framework, the magic in Brindle’s canvases actually happens in the eye of their beholders.

By: Shana Nys Dambrot - June 12, 2023

Alex Couwenberg: SuperGlide - Exhibition Video

View the exhibition video for Alex Couwenberg SuperGlide. To view the digital exhibition catalog please press the button below.

Alex Couwenberg: SuperGlide - Exhibition Catalog Now Available

In this new series of visually exquisite works, Alex Couwenberg utilizes a jazz-like ensemble of color, line and texture to create lyrically engaging, deftly complex compositions. These multi-layered canvases captivate the viewer with the precision of their virtuosic execution, but they are at heart wonderful improvisations - reductive and additive processes drawing upon his intuitive and spontaneous reactions in the moment. Couwenberg simultaneously builds upon and excavates the surfaces of his paintings, constructing an abstract archaeology of his own deeply personal, semiotic patois. Born and raised in Southern California, Couwenberg’s work expresses the seemingly contradictory sensibilities of the region - the love of nature, and its variegated, open-spaced color and light, and, conversely, the embrace of an urban architecture, in all of its physical and cultural density.

A graduate of The Art Center College of Design and The Claremont Graduate School, Couwenberg worked under the guidance of Karl Benjamin, one of the leading figures in the Southern California-base school of Hard-edge geometric abstraction. Beginning in the mid to late 60s, Benjamin was instrumental in developing a highly refined painting style, process, and philosophy of tightly ruled shapes and edges. Concurrently, other artists in LA began working with industrial materials to create highly refined surfaces, termed “Finish Fetish”, and investigating alternative mediums and technological advances. Both of these influences coalesce into Couwenberg’s post-postmodern vernacular, characterized by its layered formal, material, and textured surfaces.

A synthesis of styles and processes particular to the artist's experience materialize on the canvas to construct the poetics of his investigations. Masking off portions of the painting in his process recalls the batik technique of wax-resist dying and geometric patterning used in his father’s birthplace of Java, Indonesia, a former Dutch colony. His parents met in the Netherlands and immigrated to the U.S., making Couwenberg a first-generation Eurasian American. This synthesis of cultures manifests in his pristine Neo-Plast lines, which disrupt the rigid grid of De Stijl to formulate topsy-turvy cartographies embedded with encoded sign- systems. The alternating black-and-white banding alludes to “Invasion Stripes” used by Allied forces to define friendly aircrafts on their fuselages and wings during World War II but can also refer to Chevron stripes. The industrial spray gun is employed to create diaphanous atmospheric effects, where the foreground and background oscillate, while pearlescent paints shimmer on the surface. Couwenberg lacerates striations on portions of the architectonic compositions with tools such as brooms, all the while revealing intersections between the complex networks of positive and negative spaces. These circuits are comparable to the labyrinthine freeways Angeleno’s surmount and the dextrous, freestyle choreographies skaters wreath. Couwenberg orchestrates self-portraits that intimate a collective unconscious unveiled through material and process, ultimately converting them into cultural artifacts.

Chasing Pono, 2022, acrylic and spray on canvas, 72“ x 66“

Couwenberg’s paintings have been shown in several solo and group exhibitions throughout the United States, Canada, Europe, and Asia. His work can be found in numerous public, private, corporate, and museum collections around the world. Museum acquisitions include the Crocker Museum of Art, the Daum Museum in Missouri, Lancaster Museum of Art and History, Laguna Art Museum, Long Beach Museum of Art, and Nushi-Umeda, Tokyo to name a few. In 2007, Couwenberg was awarded the prestigious Joan Mitchell Foundation Award for his achievements in painting and in 2012 was featured as the subject of Los Angeles based filmmaker Eric Minh Swenson’s project titled “The Making Of La Fonda,” which focuses on the artist's life and studio practices.

ANDY MOSES - Three Concurrent Museum Exhibitions - ShoutOut LA

Gallery artist ANDY MOSES is currently in shows at Laguna Art Museum, Ronald H. Silverman Gallery at CalState LA, and the Armenian Museum of America in Boston.

Shout Out LA sits down with the busy artist to discuss his recent work and multiple museum exhibitions.

Be sure to check out all of these exhibitions and stop by the gallery to see an installation of a breathtaking new large scale painting installed in the gallery offices. We will be open this Saturday for the FALL OPEN and a talk by gallery artist LAWRENCE GIPE from 3-4PM.

PRESS: The Argonaut Reviews LIGHT | GLYPHS

Photograph courtesy Brent Broza Photography

Casper Brindle is convinced that he’s putting out some of his best work yet in his latest exhibition at William Turner Gallery in Santa Monica.

The artist, who began painting in the 1980s and is a disciple of the Light and Space art movement in Los Angeles, has woven a Southern California influence through all his work, whether the hot rod and surf culture found in his earlier work or the pure light in his latest exhibition.

“I think the light in LA is different than anywhere else in the world,” Brindle said. “This will be my best show yet. I’m really proud of this show.”
The show is called “Light | Glyphs” and will be on display through November 5. The series contains 25 pieces of which 15 will be shown at William Turner Gallery.

“Light is a huge part of my work in general and especially this body of work,” Brindle said. “I would say it is as important as the materials that I use, even more so. These works came to fruition just playing with light and seeing what happens with other materials. I started with light itself and manipulated the materials to do different things and bring different energies.”

Brindle, who was born in Toronto, moved to LA when he was 6 years old in the mid-1970s and he has lived there ever since. He was an apprentice to the Light and Space pioneer Eric Orr. He has exhibited on a regular basis at William Turner Gallery for more than 10 years and this is his 7th solo exhibition with the gallery.

A surfer, Brindle is constantly observing the play of light on water and how it expresses itself with color. Many of the works were done during the COVID lockdowns, something that Brindle said worked out to be a great thing for a lot of artists.

“Everything went on the backburner,” Brindle said. “You didn’t have to follow deadlines. You were kind of like, now it is time to really play with ideas and research and do the things that you can’t do when you have commitments and things like that.”

To create the works in this exhibit, Brindle used automotive paints, pigmented acrylic and metal leaf. The final works are 3 feet by 3 feet by 4 inches. He used translucent sculptural boxes which he air painted with diffused colors through the frosted surfaces.

The light in the colored background reflects in a quietly dramatic manner. In the center of each piece is a glyph, inspired by hieroglyphs that were ancient modes of communication, where symbols or marks were carved in relief to convey ideas.

Brindle’s glyph is a three-dimensional rectangle that intersects the center of the translucent box. The glyphs have been described as a beacon cutting through fog – quietly dramatic.
“I’m fascinated with hieroglyphs and how they used them to communicate,” Brindle said. “I use that as kind of a vehicle to do this newer work with glyphs. They go back awhile in the paintings.

There is just something that a spirit bigger than us is speaking to us. When I look at just a single glyph, it is speaking to that bigger power. I found that fascinating to use in the work.”

With Brindle’s use of gold and silver leaf to create the glyphs, he feels they really lend themselves to telling a story and he wanted to further the investigation into glyphs with these paintings.

Casper Brindle, Light-Glyph II, 2021, pigmented acrylic, 74” x 44” x 12”

Two different processes went into creating the works in this exhibit. With the glyphs, he did a lot of preparation, research and models. The decision-making process was very conscious as from the start he had an idea of where he wanted to go with them.
The paintings, on the other hand, had a more Zen approach. Brindle would find himself in a meditative state, a state of calmness where he let the work take over.

“It is a meditative state where all of a sudden at the end of the day, you’re like, ‘What just happened?’” Brindle said. “It’s that kind of thing when you’re driving and then all of a sudden, you’re at your destination and you don’t remember how you got there. That’s the same feeling I get when I make the works. The day starts and then it is 8 p.m. and I’ve got to go home.”

Brindle said he doesn’t typically have a preconceived idea of what he is going to do with the paintings. He lets them paint themselves.

“It’s a constant trance-like state of making right and wrong decisions along the way,” Brindle said. “I don’t say I’m going to do a blue painting. I just start and make a number of decisions along the way and just kind of paint these paintings.”

Throughout the years and with individual paintings, his choice of materials has always changed and shifted, evolving until he gets to where he is now.

“That’s part of the process,” Brindle said. “The best part about making art is the process. Things are changing all the time until you get to a place where you are like, now I have it. I know what this is about.”

The trance-like state is one that he shares with those that experience his work. Brindle said he’s had a lot of reactions to his art, but the most common one is a sense of lightness and calm — a sense of their bodies decompressing and entering a meditative state.

He stressed the importance of seeing his three-dimensional work in person. It’s the only way to experience its depth and the way the light shimmers and moves. The large paintings shift as a person walks by them, inviting viewers to pause, to explore perception.

This is Brindle’s first major show since the pandemic delayed an earlier showing at the William Turner Gallery in 2020. He invites patrons to come and lose themselves in his meditative works, to let art minister to their hungry souls.”

Meet Artist Kim DeJesus - Featured in the LA WEEKLY

Be sure to catch the feature in LA WEEKLY highlighting the work of Kim DeJesus. Read the article on the LA WEEKLY web site by clicking the button below.

Kim’s work is featured in the current exhibition CONFLUENCE. View the catalog for the exhibition below.

CONFLUENCE Exhibition Catalog Now Available

CONFLUENCE Exhibition Catalog is now available. Click on the button below to to take a look at the latest publication from William Turner Gallery.

Casper Brindle LIGHT I GLYPHS - Opening on September 11, 2021

Andy Moses: Recent Works - Extended Through February 27, 2021

William Turner Gallery is pleased to announce that we will be extending access to Andy Moses: Recent Works until February 27 due to overwhelming demand. The gallery will be offering increased appointment availability through February 27, 2021. 

Appointments will still be booked on the William Turner Gallery web site and appointments will be available from 1-5PM, Tuesday through Saturday.

Andy Moses: Recent Works - A short film by EMS

Andy Moses: RECENT WORKS - A short video about the exhibition from EMS - Photograph courtesy Alan Shaffer Photography

Studio Visit with Andy Moses

Jimi Gleason: Alchemy - From Silver Bullion to Works of Art

A native of Newport Beach, Jimi Gleason attended Orange Coast College for its strong rowing team, later transferring to UC Berkeley. In his senior year, he discovered ceramics and printmaking, taking Zen-like satisfaction in pulling ink across surfaces. He graduated with a BA in Fine Art in 1985.  After a brief stint at the San Francisco Art Institute, Jimi moved to New York City, where he lived the life of an experimental painter while working as a photo assistant and photo technician.  Upon returning to California, he worked as a studio assistant for renowned abstractionist, Ed Moses.

Jimi Gleason has spent his career exploring the reflective possibilities of a painterly surface. “By using iridescent and silver nitrate surface coats, I have managed to create visual spaces that respond to both the play of light and the location of the viewer,” he says. Mixing nontraditional materials such as silver deposit with acrylic paints, Gleason’s surfaces are highly reactive to light and shifts in the viewer’s position. Rather than focusing on the surface as an end in itself, his paintings track the play of light and the movement of the viewer, thereby acting as a mirror onto the external world. Through this interaction, Gleason hopes to induce a meditative experience for his viewers.

The silver nitrate paintings begin with a solid bar of silver, that is dissolved in concentrated nitric acid.   Once the nitric acid has evaporated Jimi is left with silver nitrate (a solid).  This element is then mixed with sodium hydroxide to create silver oxide which is dissolved in ammonium to create a compound that can be applied to the surface of the canvas.   This complicated and pricey technique produces paintings that are unique in both process and beauty.