Chris Engman
Installation view, UNTITLED San Francisco 2019
Luis De Jesus Los Angeles is very pleased to announce our participation in the third edition of UNTITLED San Francisco 2019 featuring a solo presentation of new paintings and sculptures by Canadian-born, Düsseldorf-based artist Erik Olson. The gallery will also present new works by two Los Angeles based artists, photographer Chris Engman and painter Britton Tolliver.
Erik Olson’s new oil paintings and painted sculptures—created during a month-long residency in Los Angeles—playfully jump between narrative and abstraction, space and mass, a spectrum of color and darkness, in a poetic balancing act. Olson likens his painted wood sculptures to characters in mystery plays, each flaunting their own personas. Alongside these are Olson’s paintings, which depict abstracted portraits and sculptures, from pre-Columbian objects to modernist figuration to a visual representation of Newton’s laws of motion. Overlapping realities and the challenges of representation are at the heart of Olson’s inquiries and the works are simultaneously suggestive and open to interpretation.
Chris Engman’s photographs continue to explore Jay Appleton’s theory of “prospect and refuge,” which argues that we are attracted to environments that appear to offer opportunity (prospect) and shelter (refuge), while we are wary of environments that seem to withhold either. This drive to meet our basic needs influences our experiences and shapes our aesthetic rubric. Both Refraction (2018) and Equivalence (2017) are photographs of complex photography installations. Engman affixes high-density photographs to walls, ceilings, floors, and objects in domestic rooms and workspaces. In these analog illusions, the logic of two spaces overlaps, sometimes agreeing and sometimes colliding—forcing us to question what we see.
Britton Tolliver’s paintings draw from a range of abstraction's possibilities, fusing diverse positions and processes in hard-fought, deeply considered compositions. His thickly applied paint yields sculptural configurations of shapes and color that seem to emerge as if by virtue of their own will, according to an innate, almost biological rhythm that reflects the plasticity of paint itself. Tolliver's paintings speak to a nuanced relationship with the natural world.
