Continuing through June 30, 2015
"Glow: Beauty Reigns" features representative works by Rex Ryan, Jamie Brunson and Fausto Fernandez. Thus it is unsurprising that the show explodes with painterly vibrancy and poetic abstraction. Each painter’s work hangs in a balance between figurative and abstraction that takes its influence from the natural world. In the work of Brunson, the viewer sees a vignette of a body of water, reduced to the linearity and ripples of aqueous light or a cracked desert floor in which colors have been accentuated.
In Fernandez’ mixed media paintings a less formal but deeper conceptual notion arises. While paint splatters and expressively drips throughout the works here, it also employs motifs of the industrious and the urban, effectively interrogating how the man-made interacts and affects how we view the natural in "Cylinders in a Blossom." Other work by Fernandez contains a Baldessari-esque style with appropriated images covered by neon paint drippings. And then there is the elegant work of San Francisco-based artist Rex Ryan, who passed away earlier this year, the knowledge of which adds a bittersweet aspect to the celebratory nature of both his work and the overall show. A pioneer of the melding of street and fine art in the Bay Area, the bulbous and flower-like forms are absolutely breathtaking visual constructions of the patterns and color schemes that are his signature.
