L.A. Exhibition LIMINIMAL featuring Shingo Francis

17 Aug L.A. Exhibition LIMINIMAL featuring Shingo Francis

LIMINIMAL

August 18th – September 22nd, 2018

Opening Reception: Saturday, August 18th, 6:30 – 9:30pm

JAUS
11851 La Grange Ave.
Los Angeles, CA 90025
Tel: 424-248-0781
info@jausart.com

www.jausart.com

Shingo Francis
Paul Gillis
Darcy Huebler

JAUS is pleased present the 3-person exhibition Liminimal featuring painting by Shingo Francis, Paul Gillis and Darcy Huebler examining thresholds between minimalist abstraction and other more content driven forms of expression.

The “Liminimal” exhibition begins as a set of questions. First, how does an artist making work today evoke the spirit of Minimalism and its cousin, Non-Objective Geometric Abstraction, without reverting to nostalgia or simple memesis. Secondly, how close to the minimal and/or non-objective can an artist get without losing reference to their other artistic and philosophical concerns that go beyond, for example, the narrow confines of Reinhardt or Stella’s seminal declarations. The three artists in the “Liminimal” exhibition embrace, to varying degrees, a minimal aesthetic from a formal standpoint while instilling, depending on the artist, elements such as figuration, narrative, mysticism, and traditional craft. Most notably, all three artists demonstrate an overt preoccupation with pigment, color, and its juxtaposition, and a highly evolved sense of the psychological and optical effects thereof.

In no way does this exhibition try suggest that these three are the only artists who approach their work in a comparable vein. They are not. However, all three artists manage to find, in distinct manners, a threshold or in-between space that they call their own.

In his most recent body of work, Shingo Francis utilizes translucent pigments whose fluctuations and changes can only be fully experienced and contemplated in person. The central rectangular motif follows quite literally the shape of the canvas support, a direct reference to painting as described in Michael Fried’s 1966 essay “Shape as Form”. Instead of the flat planes of color found in a Stella or Noland, the translucent pigment’s enigmatic nature ripples light between the hard edges of the rectangle producing gradations of color. With this work, Francis attempts to transport the viewer outside the realm of what he considers “ordinary consciousness.”

Paul Gillis who, through his work, examines the duality of the sacred and profane, creates flat, two-dimensional paintings that are meant to represent a specific structure, space and their relationship. The artist sees the act of painting as a proposal for reflection and meditation on the self and our relationship to the world. These “deeply personal” and “diaristic” works depict spaces of ritual and prolonged ecstatic moments, and according to the artist, “amplify basic human experiences, evoking intimacy through sensory experiences of color and light.” Gillis uses color as form with the depicted shapes oscillating between space and matter. He implements parallel tints and hues in order to achieve the desired effect of being less like a window, and more like a “gauzy mirror”.

Exploring geometry and repetition, Darcy Huebler makes use of luminous colors to develop visual structures of continuity and expanse. According to Huebler, “A grid, in its simplest formcreates a lattice for the ‘blooming, buzzing’ space of sense perception, with all its limitations and potentialities.” With clear constraints and an, at times contradictory, internal logic, the artist pursues what she considers “the nuance of materials and unbounded color”. A dialogue emerges between her intuitive color process and points of correspondence as diverse as fashion, textile design, the direction and movement of geological strata and fabric’s geometrical structure, and elements of popular culture. Huebler finds that the open, silent, space of abstraction, with its ineffable calm, provides the perfect vehicle to alter the register of seeing and extend our perceptual interface with the world.

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