Chromotherapy

Mike Henderson is known for his abstract, highly gestural oil paintings that demonstrate a palpable connection to postwar abstraction and a defining instinct for improvisation. Henderson applies thick layers of paint to produce deeply textured, three dimensional surfaces, with paint scraped off in some areas to reveal under-layers of color and texture. In As It Is Now (2017), bright jolts of neon and primary color peek from beneath dense, vertical striations of brown across the canvas. Contrasting hues, textures, and patterns come together in an irregular grid, like the syncopated beat of a song, to form a harmonious whole.

In John Chiara’s camera obscura photographs, the simple inversion of color, light and shadow reveals facets of a city at once familiar and startlingly new. Photographed directly on negative Fujiflex paper, Sutter Street at Larkin turns downtown San Francisco into a surreal, otherworldly scene. In this luminous diptych, the sharp contrast of stark black against acid-orange and fiery reds draw out architectural details of looming buildings with graphic clarity. 

Chiara’s singular approach to photography combines shooting and darkroom processing, printing directly onto photographic paper from the inside of his massive, hand-built cameras. Vestiges of the work’s creation — uneven edges of hand-cut paper, tape markings where paper was fixed to the camera — are as much a signature of Chiara’s work as the images themselves. 

Andy Goldsworthy draws from the environment, both natural and built, to create extraordinary works that are often ephemeral in nature. Red river rock (2016), filmed on the artist’s property in rural Scotland, sees the artist transforming first the smooth surface of a river rock and then the flowing river itself with iron oxide-red dust from a ground-down stone. The work unfolds gracefully over time, as the river eventually runs clean. This vivid red is derived from iron content in the earth, a pigment the artist has found in every country where he has worked. “The reason that our blood is red is because of its iron content, so we share a connection with our stone,” Goldsworthy further explains. “When I find it in Australia, or Japan, or France, I feel like I’m tapping into the same vein.”

Meghann Riepenhoff creates her camera-less cyanotypes in collaboration with the elements, and their complex, azure surfaces evoke the landscapes and conditions in which they were made—draped on the shore or over branches, packed in show, laid on shifting ice in frozen water. As they make contact with photographic materials, weather patterns, tide and current, and the chemical makeup of water all inform the resulting works, so that each is a portrait of a place and time that is both literal and abstract, and wholly unique. Created on the artist’s property — on the day of the 2020 United States Presidential Election, while observing Washington state’s stay-at-home orders — Ecotone #937 serves as a marker of an unprecedented moment, and reveals the latent political potential of abstract, landscape photography.

Over a career spanning seven decades, Bay Area painter David Simpson weaves together impulses of minimalism with a keen understanding of perceptual phenomena, to forge an entirely singular creative vision. Imperative from the Ideal (1989) is one of several large-scale, richly colored tondos paintings (so named for their distinctive shape) that Simpson created in the 1980s. Divided into perfect halves — one of remarkable depth and the other appearing to radiate with interior light — Imperative of the Ideal sees Simpson increasingly exploring the radical possibilities of reductive, abstract painting.