Best Los Angeles Contemporary Art of 2018
Best: Defying Boundaries by Jordi Alcaraz @ Jack Rutberg Fine Arts
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Unequivocally, Mr. Jordi Alcaraz’s works are a resplendent poise of intellect with beauty. The Catalan artist soothingly breaches the imagined possibilities of fine art with such mastery, we are never once left pondering about the conscience of the one who devised such concoctions. Instead, we are left with a restlessly pensive wonderment of our unity with nature and the metaphysical process of becoming. It is high Western philosophy meets Western fine art, and a treasure to experience.
Runner Up: Year One by Loren Philips and Tomoaki Shibata @ Castelli Art Space
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Castelli Art Space provided a cosmic shockwave overnight, with an energetic dazzling from Tomoaki Shibata and Loren Philip. The wild pulsations are mesmerizing, and amidst the chaotic mess, much like the endless galactic reaches known to man, there is discernible order to the madness. This is art in its purest form, with an electric panoramic expansion of what we can imagine to be harmony and rationality.
Honorable Mention: Jabberwocky by Josh Jefferson @ Zevitas Marcus Gallery
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The vibrant, irradiant swirls of Josh Jefferson possess a pseudo-geometrical texture to their beauty, which, while possessing a novel concept of form, simultaneously feels alive on the canvas to the visual eye upon inspection. Mr. Jefferson’s works are not inert in the slightest and glean excitement with their abstract novelty, with the prudent choice of colors appearing succulently.
Best Museum Art: Charles Long @ Hammer Museum “Made in L.A, 2018”
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My artistic critical prejudice is in the avoidance of political expression through aesthetics. The common evanescence of such works sullies the public forum of the contemplation of the Good. Jacques-Louis David’s The Death of Marat may have had immediate poignance during the French Revolution, as example, but such excitation is forever fossilized in history with no aesthetic momentum carried forward to the present day. Politics is married to the profane with its discourse virtually always weaponized; art is in the precious domain of the sacred with its possibility to achieve the eternity of timeless pacific gratitude.
Charles Long, then, takes an anthropological glimpse into social reality and ingeniously re-imagines it by invoking a mystical heavy-hand as a reminder that so much of human culture in world history has rested on an orientation toward the mysteriousness of existence. Mr. Long’s mysticism might have invoked fear or ominousness, but instead it is laced with a cheeky aim at symbolizing the unity of nature and all matters of creation, rendering the interface between human life and its tenancy in the natural world beautiful. That there is magic in the mystery of existence is a revitalizing, eternal message which demands approbation.