Into the Organics features works by Ariel Vargassal, Park In Sook, Sabrina Merayo Nuñez, Ji Oh, Fernando Brizuela, Daniel Papaleo, Duilio Pierri, Jesús Dupaux, Walter Erra Hubert, Andrea Santarelli, Maggie de Koenigsberg, and Luchi Szerman.

The exhibition focuses on the diversity of life and ways of living. It’s also a tribute to life in California, to a great bloom after long and heavy winter rains, to variety and abundance, to hope. Each artist in this show offers their own perspective and brings their own experiences to create a landscape of colors and heterogeneity, of beings and feelings.

Their relationships with other types of life and with Nature are varied, engaging audiences in what we can only describe as collaborations between art processes and natural world phenomena. Some of the themes presented in the artworks highlight discussions and issues present in today’s world, such as public health (especially after the Covid pandemic), environmental urgencies to coexist with other life forms and organisms, and problems related to food and energy scarcity, which in turn point out problems of inequity.

For example, Merayo Nuñez’s “Organic Bubble” is a cocoon-looking sculpture of an artist-made bioplastic material, which contains living bacteria spores and lights up through an electrical current. The visual characteristics of the artwork have a close relation to the organism’s functioning, which reinforces the organic effect of the object and highlights the positive effects of some symbiotic relations. A life that nurtures other lives, a creative force. Oh’s “Woven Soul” is a series of ‘textiles’ made of interlaced photographs that had been cut and rearranged to give life to new entities. The fragmentation of images mimics the discreet nature of digital pixels and brings forth a new unity, that’s also disjointed. It refers to modern and contemporary human experience, to multiplicity of viewpoints, and of problems. The result, a living organism, is made out of inorganic material, fabric out of silver print.

Brizuela creates his “Monsters” with cannabis flowers, and epoxy resin he carefully lays on top of a maquette structure. His sculptures, green and yellow as the grass in different seasons, form otherworldly creatures that are terrifying and yet beautiful. Brizuela highlights public health issues in his homeland (Argentina), where the use of marihuana is penalized even for medical purposes, while using sarcasm.

Other artists decided to depict Nature, organic beings, as themes for paintings or sculptures. For instance, Vargassal builds his images by putting together humans with animals. The compositions look like digitally altered photographs but are, in fact, acrylic on canvas. The hyper realist technique works because of the humorous tone, the irony. The animal presence is both organic and pertinent to the composition, where lines and movement are synchronic. With similar materials but completely different perspective, Santarelli produces images like “Summer Cycle”, an abstract and colorful acrylic painting with a direct reference to nature’s seasonal transformation. Yellows, greens, blues, and reds melt with each other to become flowers that could be serpentines that could be energy bolts.

Hubert goes even further and incorporates pieces of wood, trees, leaves, and other organic materials to the painting process, adding them either before or after pouring resin layered with acrylic or oil paint. In contrast, Papaleo’s sculptures are almost aseptic: impolite lines of metal forming sharp lines, that somehow still manage to produce soft movements and angles that replicate the beautiful shapes of flower seeds such as the Amaranth, a common plant in Asia that produces a nutritious and gluten-free grain.

In a world post Covid, where pain and loss filled our recent past, the heavy and repetitive rains in California last year gave way to an amazing range of colors, sounds, of living organisms (flowers, insects, fish, etc.). As though looking through a mirror, Nature offers us a powerful metaphor of overcoming hard times, of hope for a better future. The artists featured in Into the Organics play with creation, with imagination, with the force of Mother Earth. They are storytellers and they are the stories they tell. They are flashes of light after a dark night. And through them we can start healing, renewing our hopes and dreams.

(Curatorial text by Jonathan Feldman)