LOS ANGELES

An enchanting suite of large, aspirational, atmospheric mixed-media paintings, smaller drawings, and video installation, “Correlations and Isomorphisms” on the whole is as precise, mathematical, ethereal, and earthly as the title’s scientific metaphor suggests. The main operational premise all the work shares, despite the disparity of media, is a metonymical relationship between process and image—in that the artist’s techniques mirror the movements of elements of nature so closely that the resulting images both represent and recreate them. To this end, each painting uses not only a plethora of styles of brushwork from the loose to the bold, sprayed and rough-hewn, but a variety of media with eclectic surface qualities, the better to embody the turbulent fullness of Space.

The wide, sensual, crimson expanse, snaky constellation, and topographical ambiguity of Ophiuchus constellation is the 13th sign of the zodiac… (2008, graphite, dirt, gesso, charcoal and enamel on paper, 60 x 137 inches) is both inscrutable and familiar to students of landscape painting, sacred mound architecture, and astronomy. A pendulous, radiant moon, blustery clouds, and spiky mountains are rendered head-on, but could easily be read as a bird eye’s view of the surface of Mars, or as a gaze straight up into the sky. Eyes floating in the abyss (2008, graphite, dirt, gesso, charcoal and enamel on paper, 100 x 140 inches) is exactly what it sounds like—a big, burly, black and white expanse of shadowy fullness, flirting with abstraction until, at the last moment, the gestural, painterly mixed media is violated by small but jarringly figurative elements: a pair of eyes, pointed ovals of enamel with gradated colors, and a smooth and reflective texture.

Sometimes the paper juts to the side, as seams between large, unframed sheets are left deliberately uneven; the edges are almost never smooth or symmetrical even in single-sheet works. Compared to the meditative sensibility of the paintings, the multi-channel video works generally took a more serious yet subversive tone. A few individual works demonstrate more figurative specificity, featuring skeletal remains, a view of the moon through an open window, or the addition of floating vehicles with piercing headlight beams, which at once inform and expand upon the fraught backgrounds, those multi-dimensional renderings of the spatial universe. On balance, however, the most compelling aspects of Arceneaux’s talents are in his muscular, adventurous approach to more purely abstract painting.

“Ophiuchus constellation is the 13th sign of the zodiac…,” 2008, Edgar Arceneaux, Graphite, dirt, gesso, charcoal and enamel on paper, 60" x 137"
Photo: Taidgh O'Neil, courtesy of Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects