John Wood & Cuong Ta: Interplay
John Wood and Cuong Ta: Interplay Opens November 1st
November 1, 2012 – November 30, 2012
Reception for the artists: Saturday, November 3rd, 3-5 pm
Open late on First Thursday, November 1st 5-7 pm
K. Imperial Fine Art in San Francisco is pleased to announce Interplay, an exhibit of new paintings and clay sculptures by Oakland and Berkeley based artists John Wood and Cuong Ta.
Both Wood’s gestural mixed media paintings and Ta’s hemispherical wall buttons approach form, line and texture with a lyrical immediacy. While Wood seeks to portray the sensual and seductive with his line explorations, Ta’s stoneware reliefs exude restraint and formal design.
Wood begins his process working directly from a model, looking to find the connection between the figure, the mark-making and his own ethereal esthetic. As he builds successive layers of graphite, crayon, oil pastel, pigment stick and enamel the figure fades in obscurity and gestures of expansive abstraction take over.
Ta builds his forms out of slabs, then utilizes tape and latex resists, adding texture in the form of geometric and organic patterns, then adds warmth to the smooth cool surface of the clay in the glazing and firing.
Joyce Lovelace of American Craft Magazine says of Ta: “Drawing from a vocabulary of lines and shapes, [Ta’s] able to design an endless variety of free-form geometric compositions in light/dark color pairings (often tan and black), all meant to illustrate “the play of positive and negative space and the tension between boundary and flow.” [American Craft Magazine]
Of Wood’s vision, Kenneth Baker explains: “Bay Area painter John Wood has the rare knack of making small, busy abstract paintings seem big. The gestures involved cannot be expansive, but they evoke a vision that is. His pictures stand as pure assertions of conviction, if not of confidence, in their artistic adequacy. Their very openness to dismissal forms part of their appeal.” [San Francisco Chronicle]
K Imperial Fine Art is located at 49 Geary Street on the 4th floor. The artist reception for Interplay will be held on Saturday, November 3rd from 3 – 5 p.m.
For more information on John Wood, Cuong Ta or to inquire about the work, please contact the gallery at (415) 277-7230 or aimee@kimperialfineart.com .
