Preternatural, the three-person exhibit at Marcia Wood Gallery through April 16, refers to things that exist outside of nature which cannot be explained by conventional means. Each of the artists – Jennifer Coates, David Humphrey and Mie Yim — creates a representational world that has been twisted and turned in dreamlike scenes that fill one either with anxiety or sunlit peace.
The artists are in uncharacteristic harmony with one another. For starters, they all embrace a saturated palette. Their works’ representational strangeness, which evokes the unconscious through deliciously skewed illustrations of concepts of things seen and unseen, relates them to Surrealist dream images.
Coates’ paintings conjure the transcendentalism of Ralph Waldo Emerson in small figures within a lusciously abstracted, paranormal forest in the style of Paul Klee. Borrowing Klee’s language of abstraction, Coates turns Klee’s forms inside out in a spiritual landscape saturated with color and form.
Coates’ “Frost,” 2018, acrylic on canvas, is the first work the viewer sees when entering the exhibition. It is a lot more abstract than her recent work: thickly painted black lines, outlined in white, dance around the canvas in an enchanting array of drips and dabs of various sizes and viscosities that hint at landscape.
Her “Two Centaurs,” 2021, made with acrylic spray paint on canvas, unlocks a vision of a new landscape of dense forest that divides up the canvas vertically using trees outlined in a cerulean blue with the boldness of spray-painted orange and yellow.
The painted forest is deep, dark and impenetrable; two small headless centaurs frame the entrance. The mysterious forest in her “Headless Hand Holders,” 2021, is a mass of fantastically messy yellow, green and orange spray paint that defines a canopy held up by trees outlined in a luminous periwinkle blue; three headless figures hold what could only be their heads. One can only imagine what narrative is at play here.
In Humphrey’s paintings, twisted and playful compositional elements show his intense relationship to Pop Art and such representational artists as David Salle and R. B. Kitaj.
“Blue Horse,” 2016, is a large canvas visually split in half with an intense blue silhouette of a horse’s body filling the right side of the canvas. A small orange horse standing in a parallelogram of green brushstrokes presses into the leg of the blue horse, creating a tension that is further complicated by marks that delineate an architectural space on the left side of the painting. It’s a scene you might see in a dream.
“Poodle,” 2021, is a large and wonderful portrait of an abstracted white dog whose form has been distorted by the artist. As if this were not enough, Humphrey’s paint and color are rich and saturated with teals and blues that are so powerful and engaging it is hard not to carry them with you to the next work.
Yim’s paintings express a different kind of cross between figuration and abstraction, more related to the body. Although the forms that fill her paintings are not figures, they have an anatomical presence that calls up the Surrealists.
“Surrogate,” 2021, is a head or a torso not fully articulated by the rounded forms that fill out the composition. Her forms evoke monsters within the body, as in “Medusa,” 2021, whose snake-like path also reads as a colon.
“Fugu,” 2021, a horizontal canvas composed of what might be dissected organs, is made up of a myriad of small circular elements drawn in white paint over a red, blue and yellow curvilinear abstract form. Fugu is a pufferfish which can be deadly if eaten without proper preparation. In proper fugu preparation, a trace of the poison is left in the dish so that the sensation of being poisoned is part of the experience. The risk of consuming fugu is parallel to viewing Yim’s art — she creates works that don’t feel safe.
The exhibition consists mostly of large paintings, but the true jewels of Preternatural are a grouping of small drawings, all made from 2021-22, which reflect the inventiveness so many artists discovered during the pandemic.
Coates’ “Three Deer, a Tree and Some Blue,” 2022, is a charming and intense offshoot of her painterly vocabulary. The work centers on a tree whose bark is a fauve masterpiece, with tiny flecks in a myriad of colors surrounded by the most intense ultramarine blue. Humphrey’s two drawings are “Framed” and “Full,” both from 2021. His bold abstraction is overlaid with marks and images or text that have a graphic sensibility and presence; the drawings make one think he is tagging his own work.
Yim’s four drawings, “Quarantine” #39, #146, #175 and #151, in pastel on handmade paper, are like portraits that have run amuck into abstraction. The inventiveness of these three artists’ drawings, in which they envisage their respective worlds on a small scale, is mesmerizing.
