Rather life than those prisms without depth even if the colors are purer
Rather life than that always clouded hour
Than those terrible wagons of cold flame
Than those soft stones (...)
Andre Breton
Rather Life
If lollipops had a subconscious then they would dream of shimmered cogs and mottled circles that hover in a pictorial plane that masquerades as a reflecting pool about to overflow.
They would dream of Sandeep Mukherjee’s two paintings that make up part of LA Louver Gallery’s Rogue Wave ’07: 12 Artists from Los Angeles exhibition.
A cross between Coney Island candy and Ravenna mosaics, their textured grittiness he builds up from either Chiclets-daubs of color or else concentric circular bands of painted splashes.
Composed with acrylic ink on Duralene, a gracious surface that rewards Windex-as-catalyst accidents and confers visual grace on minutia and other painterly, two-sided effects, the space appears flat-ish: the shapes slightly overlap and dimple the picture plane like a ruffled doily. Tinctured with hot reds, cold blues, and middle ground greens and yellows, the space throbs as the circles stew in a parboil simmer.
Only when you account for the hypnotic compositional effects of two monumental horizontally oriented Untitled pieces do you appreciate Mukherjee’s complex and sophisticated treatment of space.
In one composition he lulls the viewer with hammock-lazy French curve swirls that crest and ebb like a perpetual motion wave machine. In another composition the space in the two side sidereal circles funnels into the picture plane in a vortex of swirls and jiggles relative to the flatter space of the middle gold circle.
The result is not just a surface that glistens like the ripples made by a school of koi fish caught in a skein of algae but a conflict of figure and ground that roils the surface, that complicates the reading of a presumably unified space, and that requires attention to the lateral and spatial movement of shapes.
The work abounds with art historical citations: the light-diffused cityscapes of Orphic Robert Delaunay; Hans Richter’s Dada experiments in abstract patterns put onto spinning phonograph disks; the gears of the Precisionist Charles Sheeler; and the auras of Piet Mondrian’s early Theosophical landscapes.
It also recalls ecclesiastical meditative pedestrian mazes as well as, for example, the nimbus that encircles the about to be betrayed Christ in Giotto’s Kiss of Judas.
And that’s why, adorned with exquisite detail and preciousness, with compositional elegance and spatial ambiguity, with shapes that allude to the symbol of infinity as well as to a degradation from idealized Platonic shapes to temporal hula hoops, Sandeep Mukherjee’s work in this show confers to him at least temporary status of a latter-day Limbourg Brother; and these his postmodern, post-lapsarian, always timely, secular day-planner Books of Hours.
Gallery hours are 10 AM – 6 PM, Tuesday – Saturday. The show runs until August 18. The gallery is located at 45 North Venice Boulevard, Venice. For more information call (310) 822-4955 or visit http://www.lalouver.com/.
