GROUP EXHIBITION   "ART INSPIRED BY FOOD"

NOVEMBER 5-27, 2015      OPENING RECEPTION: November 5, Thursday 6-8PM

 Artists: Robin Antar, Carlos Castano, Deborah Chabrian, Yuka Imata, Randall W. L. Mooers, Riano D. Reno, Linda

Gallery Juno is pleased to present a group exhibition inspired by and created from the love of food and all its beauty.  The variety to choose from with its various colors, textures, shapes or seasonal place has influenced each artist to respond with their individual works of art. 

Whether working in painting or sculpture, the seven artists gathered here together share a common affection for the aesthetic qualities of those things that are quite always all around us – the things that daily we may inspect, select, purchase, grow, cook, and finally consume – our food; natural or processed, whose beauty and visual charisma is often overlooked because of its common utilitarian function.  In truth food in its many forms has been a favored subject globally and historically for centuries, for millennia; mosaics of fruit and fish on the floors of Pompeiian villas, grains and game fired onto Puebloan pottery, meticulously painted Dutch still lifes of rich delicacies and rotting produce, Pop Art soft sculptures of greasy cheeseburgers and melting ice cream cones.  We are what we eat, we make art from who we are, and the endless diversity of nature’s bounty and man’s culinary legacy will always provide inspiration, fascination, and nourishment for the keen artistic eye.

Like a number of the artists in Art Inspired By Food, Linda West works within the traditional practice of the painted still life, carefully considering the effect of color and texture in her designs, and taking cues from the “personality of the setup and the mood”. Through soft and lush brushwork, swirls of sugary icing adorn colorful cupcakes, ripe fruits burst with color, and vegetables, tableware, and surface harmonize through bold compositions of vibrant arrangements.  

Robin Antar’s exactingly realistic sculptures serve as records of the temporality of food and of contemporary consumption.  Working in stone and with a sculptural technique invented by the artist herself, Antar highlights and in turn elevates our habits of eating and living and the mundane products of that, such as a crumpled and discarded soda can, to iconic proportions…preserved for eternity…artifacts of the everyday.

Painter Yuka Imata finds inspiration in the wonder and allure of nature, and seeks to capture the fleeting transience of that beauty onto the canvas.  With a refined focus on the contrast of colorful fruits set against muted surfaces of marble and plaster, and a carefully considered balance and harmony of geometry, Imata’s paintings infuse fruits and food with a classical elegance.

Deborah Chabrian is a watercolor artist with a decidedly perceptive eye, evident in her technique of finely tuned realism, which adds a powerful dimension to paintings of traditional still life subjects from food to tableware. More than simply a masterful technique, Chabrian’s balanced arrangements are expressions of seemingly stolen moments, glimpses into a more personal and very acute sense of storytelling . “To me… still life paintings are anything but still… they are personal narratives, full of life, that tell the story of a person, time and place that I find endlessly inspiring”.

The paintings of Randall W.L Mooers have an almost baroque opulence to them, a dynamism of movement, surface, color and form in compositions that explode with a powerful tension between the variety of objects on display and the relationships to one another and the viewer.  Like the Dutch masters of the 17th century, Mooers’ intricate and complex arrangements of exquisitely rendered elements, combinations of the “organic” and the “artificial”, often densely packed together or radiating throughout the picture plane, and careful attention to light and texture only serve to heighten the overall feeling that we are witnessing something of a grand event, a parade or party, played out on the scale of a bulb of garlic and a honeybee.

Riano D. Reno’s subtle still lifes belie an quiet yet wholly vivacious personality.  Through enigmatic combinations of subject matter, from fish and gourds to bottles of whiskey and cigars, Reno uniquely synthesizes these unrelated elements into one singular voice, they feel something like characters in a play, small inanimate actors on a set-table stage working for the greater good of the production.  "Painting being a matter of interpretation, my aim is to find the right light key, placing the colors and shapes together as a jigsaw puzzle, and integrating all these different parts to form a harmonious whole."

Carlos Castano is a painter’s painter, employing a light, feathery, textural brushwork that dances over all of the elements in his classical still lifes - foods, table surfaces, and simple tonal backgrounds - and establishes a perfect homogeneity of color and form.  Castano’s work is the perfect example of the way in which an artist sensitive to the perceptual effects of his subject can create new life from that which is inherently life-less; the “still” life rendered active…animate…alive.