Tactile and Verse: Textural at The Arts Fund
By Audrey Lopez and Debra Herrick
Karl Kempton’s delicate cosmographies on paper are punctuated by Juan Manuel Perez Salazar’s thickly veneered discs that orbit The Arts Fund gallery space in North County curator John Hood’s current exhibition, “Textural: An examination of the tactile and verse.”
This poetic counterbalance is redoubled by the works of “Textural’s” two other artists, Jean-Pierre Hébert and William Loveless. Hebert’s stringy algorithm-inspired, graphite-plotted organisms are somewhere between a loosely sketched Milky Way and the Golden Ratio, while Loveless’ circles are poppy, tightly packed planets suspended in polyvinyl resin.
Above, Jean-Pierre Hébert. Below, Karl Kempton
Between polish and pearl, pencil and paint, “Textural” achieves a rare coherence in a group show—conceptual and visual. The proliferation of circular figures creates an immediate dialogue between the works, while the stark differences in texture and process asks the viewer to consider the underpinnings of the curated universe: the relationship between text and texture, meaning and touch.
A two-step touch of hand to key, key to page floats just beyond the surface of Kempton’s careful reveries of type and text. The methodical nature of his process—which begins by plotting out each letter strike on graph paper—highlights the temporal dimension of these intricately woven geometries. As such, Kempton’s pieces act as mediators, revealing letters as artisanal materials central to a practice of celestial craft.
Juan Manuel Perez Salazar
The swirls and swipes of soil, pigment and paint that comprise Perez Salazar’s mandalas invoke gestural echoes of the repetitive motions of care involved in manual labor: pushing soil to sow fields, smoothing mortar to adhere tiles, burnishing a surface until it shines. In this way, Perez Salazar invites the viewer to celebrate these daily practices as sacred meditations that create a constant, collective connection to the divine.
Hebert’s work translates the eloquence of line found in nature’s shifting forms through lines of computer code to large-scale gossamer arrays printed on rice paper. Viewers are encouraged to investigate the delicately layered filaments using the magnifying glasses hanging next to each work in order to fully decipher the depth of their quiet beauty.
William Loveless
Loveless’ experimental wet-on-wet technique employs glue and resin to generate small circular worlds which resonate as colorful petri dishes possibly at work incubating tiny bacteria or birthing entire galaxies. This intergalactic travel from micro to macro and back again links the acts of artistic and cosmic creation, proposing trial and error as a valuable methodology inherent to each.
Hood has collected a group of artists who are either unleashing iconography in experimental forms or exploring haptic surfaces that create an unusual color experience for the viewer. Across all works, the artists ask viewers to engage in thoughtful consideration of materials and processes used to perceive and construct the realities that surround us and the cosmologies that form us.
Bright, colorful and intellectually stimulating, this exhibition—the most highly attended Arts Fund opening of 2019—offers golden nuggets for a range of viewers. Coders will delight in Kempton and Hebert’s drawings. Artisans from many fields will puzzle at Perez Salazar’s earthy forms, and surf-enthusiasts will be interested in Loveless’ resin-coated works.
“Textural: An examination of tactile and verse” features works by Jean Pierre Hebert, Karl Kempton, William Loveless and Juan Manuel Perez Salazar and is open November 15 to December 20, 2019 at The Arts Fund of Santa Barbara, 205-C Santa Barbara Street.
