LOS ANGELES, CA.- JAUS is presenting the 3-person exhibition Liminimal featuring painting by Shingo Francis, Paul Gillis and Darcy Huebler, and curated by Ichiro Irie. The following was written by Irie.
In the early summer of 2016, I had the opportunity to visit the then freshly reopened SFMOMA. There were 19 exhibitions on display in the massive multi-story venue, with a formidable quantity of work by the usual suspects and other lesser known talents, all seemingly competing for me the visitor’s attention. Among these exhibitions was a collections show called “Pop, Minimal, and Figurative Art”, again featuring canonical artists from each category such as Warhol, Judd and Close. Of all the hundreds of works on display at SFMOMA, the Minimalist section of this exhibition was what had stuck with me the most. Gone was the sense of rupture or challenge to the status quo that these works probably offered when they were first exhibited. Instead, suffering from a bit of information overload, these restrained works by Stella, Lewitt, Judd and company gave my mind a sense of repose while simultaneously managing to stand out from the rest of the museum.
The current exhibition began as a pair 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. A lot has been exhibited and written about under the rubric of Postminimalism since the late 60’s encompassing work as diverse as the anti-form aesthetic of Eva Hesse and Robert Morris to the Light and Space art of James Turrell and Robert Irwin. Much of this work was considered a reaction against the rigid Minimalist ethos as much as it was inspired by it. A lot of Postminimal art isn’t very minimal at all.
Which led me to my second question; 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’ works demonstrate a considerably more overt and evolved preoccupation with pigment, color, and its juxtaposition and psychological/optical effects thereof than their aforementioned predecessors.
What I see as a commonality in the three artists who comprise this exhibition is a sense of liminality towards Minimalism and its historical relatives. In no way do I suggest that these three are the only artists who approach their work with these concerns. 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.
Born in Santa Monica, CA, Shingo Francis currently lives and works in Los Angeles, CA and Yokohama, Japan, and has exhibited his work internationally since the early 90’s. Since 2014, he has had solo shows at K. Imperial Fine Art in San Francisco, CA, Galerie Paris in Yokohama, Japan, Space bm in Seoul, South Korea, and Misa Shin Gallery in Tokyo, Japan. Recent group exhibitions include Sezon Museum of Modern Art in Karuizawa Japan, CFA gallery in Berlin, Germany, Minnesota Street Projects in San Francisco, CA and Japan Foundation in Los Angeles, CA. His work belongs to the collections of Banco de España in Madrid, Spain, the Frederick R. Weisman Art Foundation in Los Angeles, CA, and the JP Morgan Chase Art Collection in New York, NY. Francis received his BFA from Pitzer College and MFA from Art Center College of Design.
Paul Gillis was born in Kansas City, Missouri. He earned his BFA from the University of Kansas in 1997 and received his MFA from the Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University in 2007. In 2014 he had solo exhibitions at Edward Cella Gallery in Los Angeles and RH Contemporary in New York. He has exhibited internationally and is included in private collections internationally. Paul lives and works in Los Angeles, California.
Darcy Huebler has exhibited her work internationally in shows at Fredericks Freiser Gallery in New York City, the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, Tanja Grunert Gallery in Cologne, the Young-Eun Contemporary Art Museum in Seoul, The Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco, and the BEAM Foundation in Nijmegan the Netherlands. Recently, Huebler has participated in Christian Mayer's Palm Capsule project at the MAK Center and exhibited a new series of paintings at PĜST, Los Angeles. Her work is included in the contemporary collection of the LACMA (Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art) and the Berkeley Art Museum. Darcy Huebler received both her BFA and MFA at California Institute of the Arts where she now teaches.
