VISION + VISUALS ARTGROUP: EXHIBIT II AT STUDIO Z

A couple of clicks removed from the toney art galleries on Theatre Row, seven hungry up-and-comers have their work on display at Studio Z in an exhibit that will run until April 30^th, with a reception on Friday, April 27^th. Located on Mason Street near Market, Studio Z is ensconced in a well-worn building in a perpetually neglected section of the Tenderloin. You walk up three flights of stairs, past punched out walls and liberal crumbs of plaster. It looks like the hallway of a skid row hotel, ripe for torching. But when you enter the gallery, you are transported to a different world.

Mind you, Studio Z has little in common with the slick, big name galleries uptown, but it is spacious with bare hardwood floors and features four rooms and a hallway for viewing work, amply furnished with beanbag chairs and small divans where the viewer can chill out and take in the art. And there’s quite an impressive array of pieces to take in.

Painters, Courtney Booker, Laila Carlsen, Camilla Grythe, Mike Meneses and David Regan, photographer, Jorge Gonzalez and mixed media artist, Nathan Aaron Place are featured in this exhibit through the efforts of promoter, Owen Geronimo, a capable artist in his own right. He and Zeremy, the proprietor of Studio Z, have made excellent use of the wall space. The art fits well in their assigned places, but you might miss the two Gonzalez photographs if you step into the room too quickly.

The first one faces you as you enter (the work was unlabeled at the time of this printing.) And what faces you are two faces. Swathed in a rich blue, the head of a stone Buddha halfway conceals the countenance of a young man, equally serene. To the immediate left of the door, is a four-panel black and amber print of two darkly clad people lurking around an ancient capstone shaped like a crucifix.

The first small room to the immediate left of the faces houses Nathan Place’s artwork. Nicknamed, “the Metal Man” by Zeremy, Place earns his sobriquet with a quirky installment of metal panels lining the walls and foot-high statuettes arranged on the floor, flush with the sides. The panels are all of equal size, four by six inches, with a thickness of one-sixteenth of an inch. These are covered with several layers of paint, the outermost being an off-white. The layers are subsequently burned through, scraped or otherwise peeled to reveal the bright colors underneath. There’s at least one or two scraped down to the naked metal, laying bare its own unique pattern beneath the veneer. The statuettes are cut from the same material. They are surreal, vaguely humanoid figures, painted blue on one side and red or left bare on the other, their jagged limbs twisted and curved, as if dancing underwater.

The second room down has deep green walls, which lend themselves nicely to the three paintings exhibited by Mike Meneses. Two contrasting works face each other in a stare-down of order versus chaos. To the immediate left, a pink square with a bright peach halo floats in a milky haze. Its opposite number is a frenzy of Kandinskyesque lines and mad bursts of color.

Hanging above the room’s entrance, a portrait mediates between the two. A human face is rendered in the furious lines of the one painting, but colored in with similar pastel hues, mostly pinks and greens, evoking the other, thus rendering balance in the green room.

Lining the walls of the hallway, are Laila Carlsen’s stark portraits with smooth brushwork reminiscent of Paul Delvaux. Serenely detached human faces and figures appear before desolate backgrounds in muted, dark shades. One portrait in profile is of a wizened man, wearing animal’s skull for a hat. Another is of a bald fellow in what looks like Native American garb, sitting in the middle of a barren landscape. Her work gets more surreal as you go down the hall past the main room toward the third small room. Two pale female nudes are joined side-by-side at the forearm with a dark background. The left figure is an assertive, fully developed woman; the right is a painfully demure, less developed girl of the same height and hair color.

David Regan’s canvases are featured in the third small room. Four of his paintings are extreme closeups of leaves in green, orange and brown. These are assembled of blocks and swatches of color and shade—Rothko meets O’Keefe. The three others are abstract studies of closely matching or strangely compatible shades, rendered in blocks of color: aquamarine for one; yellows, browns and greys for the second; olive, grey and blue for the third.

Camille Grythe hails from the same city as Laila Carlsen (Oslo, Norway), but oddly enough, they had never even heard of one another until they were introduced in San Francisco by Owen. Upon viewing the large paintings she has on display in the main room, you begin to understand why the unfamiliarity. Her color scheme is similar to her fellow countrywoman’s, but her dynamic human figures are caught in mid motion, rushing to keep up with her large and lively brush. The one exception is the haunting picture of crowd of people abstracted into petals of color. The piece is still quite active, though, with the figures tightly crunched together, pushing for whatever space there is available to them.

Courtney Booker’s paintings share one wall with a couple of Grythe’s work, and then flat-out command the enormous brick center wall, continuing to the back behind the DJ equipment. These assertive canvases were previously featured at 66BALMY. She also has a lively brush to compliment Grythe, but the similarity ends there. The paintings on display consist mostly of portraits she completed in the latter half of 2000, rendered in bold colors, mostly reds and yellows, decisive, linear brushstrokes and liberal application of glazes.

No motion is wasted. A dark red raven in deathwatch repose is rapidly set forth as if there wasn’t a moment to lose. Three faces in rapid succession depict the artist awakening with a roar. Again, there is balance in the room with Booker’s fire facing Grythe’s water. Earlier work that is more placid (relatively speaking) shares the wall with Grythe’s crowds. In one, a woman’s head, bloodied around the nose and mouth, floats, face up, in a bright blue pool with blue lilies.

All of the artists are represented by Vision + Visuals ArtGroup. Overall, the exhibit is well conceived and executed. The artists are fresh and fearless, fitting extremely well in the space. A viewing is well worth the time. Give yourself at least an hour to take it all in.