Seen and Unseen

Review by James P. Satcher

The evolution of abstraction. Found? Unfound?
Where, where, is it?
The Seen and Unseen Exhibit at 125 East 6th Street Gallery in downtown LA swirls in four large rooms carrying one’s eye as if flowing in a synaptic remembrance of time and place, as if gathering flowers in meadows and defining life again. Needless to say, abstract is seen and unseen, but more in word or unword. More in the search of the mystery of ourselves? Through time honored history the ebb and flow of questions canvassed, sculpted or the layers of purity we search. Our eyes touch the art like the eagle’s talon hunting the surface to find sustenance beneath the water. Ferruled brushes swipe across the canvassed terrain; stopping for moments in peopled renderings. No boundaries. No judgments. Only upon faith smiled, laughed or brought to tears we define our truths.

Irina Chelyapov, the curator, has placed her paintings of the inner city of Los Angeles on three walls as if one is walking down a street and turning at each corner. Her innocent pastel colors depict the hopes dreams of inner city life yet one feels a certain confinement as the buildings and apartments are captured behind chain or iron fences and signs to keep one aware of a sense having a trapped feeling. A dry wall tape speaks to the fragility of man's need to prove his struggle to identify himself in his self-absorption. Above are angels who hover in a knowing fashion that faith is the redeeming consequence that binds the soul’s connectedness between man, earth and art. Irina’s geometric Renaissance of the city skyline shows the great warmth of the giving soul of art. The multi-faceted shadings of color depict Los Angeles against an equally faceted horizon. This alludes to the complexities of the city of man, always looked upon by the angels from the city’s inception. There is a gaiety to her work. The pastel-colors capture innocence or innocence gestured. The viewer is challenged to decide.

Kiki (Gregor Mikaelyan) has only one canvas.

“The Two of Us Are Still Alone”, and I suppose in the layered textures of mixed media, the red ribbon, black rope with strips of cardboard against streaking black and turquoise thrust expose turbulence and then reconciliation. We are ultimately alone with our soul’s trek through the yin and yang of life. I’m with you on this one, Kiki, and even though I am walking away I can still feel your hands pulling me back.

Luka Krstich has chosen watercolor and colored pencils on panels for his wonderful abstraction of faces and curvilinear design. One is reminded of Cubism and works of Picasso. Though many of his works are untitled the heroic colors of his faces, especially the regal king exemplifies his talent in the world of abstract. His minimalist rectangular Bas-relief sculpture in plaster smoothly laid upon a mauve background attends to a hieroglyphic interpretation of voice and communication. And had Luka been born in the time of navigation and exploration by ship, his miniatures of gyroscope-curvilinear-arch-wooden sculptures could whisk us to the voyages of imagination. He stimulates our perception from the known images of the conscious to his iconic flow in 3D Fantasy 1-3-4. As if the computation of the galaxies could channel through his work.

Egor Sovtsov must be a serious satirical artist if at all possible. His plastic pointillism of a shooting practice anatomy drawing of “Acupuncture” defines hilarity of a miss-calculation of commercialism on acupuncture in a society willing to protect its idealism, which adds to the humor of a snake rising foam with implanted eyes along its body line to signify the watching eye of good and evil. “Cut”, “Fifth Empire”, And “Milky Way” seem to be a trilogy as if perchance it is the birth and life seeping through an asphalt placenta. “Fifth Empire”, an enameled streak with a pulsating multi- umbilical core of pastels of yellow, green leads to an elevated face, a somber amazement, at a life he sees from the canvas. “Cut” seems to define the beginning of a birth of an acceptance nourished by the commercialism of un-natural milk in “Milky Way” comedic subtext. A subtext that leads to the clinging man at the entrance, a black and white mirrored image of either a man clinging from falling or a man climbing out of a predicament of a laughing self.

Sergei Tivetsky, with swift brush strokes, has created a mystic landscape within his composition, "The Gold Landscape". In this painting the immensity of its stillness grows and explodes toward the eye as the viewer moves away. An elegant dance of turbulent movement in "Hollywood Hills" with splashes of primary neon’s gives a sense of the glamorized distortion that permeates the visual field leading one to his apparition of overlays of golden layered storms pulling

one’s eye from the hued blue horizon that settles upon the innocence of daisies like whispers. In “Temptation” one is drawn to the textured realism of a layered cross hatching of light grays leading to a conic if not iconic cone of a spilling of bronze candies clearly defined and barely out of reach to sneak a taste before another viewer comes.

Tatiana Savchenko acrylics overlay. Marbleize and pulsate toward her paintings, “Letter”, “The Dancing Rose”, “The Prayer” and “The Desire” define an evolution of melding thoughts born of deep hues of blue and caramel. The volcanic movement like lava bursts. Settles. Like an aperture of a lens, her art opens and closes to a new level of awareness. A calm yearning of the senses are seen and not to be seen. A flow of passage to a higher source calls the viewer. Like dew drops on petals that nourish life further her art will grace any wall.

Lark (Larisa Pilinsky) paintings “Moon Light City”, “Unknown World”, and “All Seeing”, reflect a meditative quality similar to the composer, Tchaikovsky, while adding one note to another the composition reveals itself. Internal abstraction realized is from the spilling of the eyes into the hands and the hands upon the world. As revealed in the quality of channels we see through the passages the opening and closing of one reality into another. Layered textures of thick paper blend into an abstracted bridge of clarity as the movement of the eye begins to understand the soul of it. Splattered cuts of CD's and VW symbols reveal recognition of the known leading to the unknown leading once again a meditative transition of an internal rest. Lark touches the face of abstraction one might touch the string of a harp. Resonance of vibrations. Meditations of sound on canvas.

Narine Isajanyan is a more minimalistic abstractionist.

She has created both large and small works and has derived from architecture her resolution to the pursuit of art. Through her “Avatar”, a texture of layered waves flows easily and spill into a significant abstraction of communication as a newly dis-covered testament. “Bitter Tears”, “Go for It”, “Come to Me”, and “A Slice Of Love” come in the form of wooden black-tiered droplets, taut coiled wires, and the meshing of patterned textures indicating the modern tensions of the pursuit of a floating sphere of love entangled. Her large elliptical canvas is a more modern conceptualization of time, reality and spirituality placed on a textured canvas of hues of browns like a swirling tornado of memory seeking to settle “Back in Reality”.

Nigel Cooper is a sidewalk of horizontal interpretation at day’s end. All of the days it seems. The deep flow of a confluence of textures is as if one is looking from the ocean to the city. As if one is one with the wave and discovers the boundary of the wave of modern world thrusting itself upward and outward held only by the titles. “Middle of Nowhere Urban Energy”, “Energetic”, announces itself in expansive turbulence of inspired tones of purple’s bruising intensity. In uproarious folds it asks the eye to enter, to enter in this tunneled energy and feel the tumbling of one’s senses as your eye moves with the vibrations of unexpected conditions. Turned, tumbled and twisted in the deep quicksand, his provocations leads one to the middle of the nowhere of self.

My final thoughts.
What does an artist want in words or unwords seen or unseen? Poetry? Clarity? I am not the one to know. I am my words or my unwords and I am more unseen than seen. I am the observer. I cannot know what a reader wants. I do know that he does want. Abstract made clearer might be a better choice. It seems that definition is antiquated. Words are the carry over of symbols. One without the other would be another form of abstraction. Yet maybe that is the newer truth. A new beginning. A new world to be defined as something never seen. When something has no definition does it exist? Seen or Unseen. Ask me to be honest. I leave it to you to feel the unwords...
Seen and Unseen is open until June 29th, 125 East 6th Los Angeles California
James P. Satcher