LOS ANGELES, CA.- LAUNCH Gallery is presenting Surface Play featuring John Koller, Nano Rubio and Michael Freitas Wood. These artists share a common love for and ability to build up their chosen surfaces with precision and a true sense of deeper purpose. The paint and other mediums expertly applied expose inner truths while attempting to shield us from many of today’s complex challenges. These profound expressions respectfully acknowledge our past while filling us with optimism and joy as we curiously and cautiously move toward a new light.

Michael Freitas Wood has been contemplating the cycle of life and the importance of centering ourselves in our truths - physically, mentally and spiritually. The mandala designs he incorporates serve as both a window to the world and a mirror held up to oneself. He skillfully applies and deconstructs a variety of materials to provide a pathway of understanding to specific themes and ideas. His hope is that the viewer uses his specifically titled creations to find deeper meaning and understanding of these issues.

Nano Rubio uses a variety of materials, intricate layering, painterly weaving, and gestural markings to convey the complex nature of living a full life today. He explores the struggle within nature as well as the competition between technologies. He acknowledges the sentimentality of an analog past versus the seduction of present digital domains.

As more humans are displaced by automation, environmental, and political concerns, I find my paintings themselves becoming more complex. My landscapes have morphed into unresolved fields of conflict where gestural acts provide a space of repose for thinking about the problematic status of action painting and abstraction in general.

John Koller approaches painting with a layered sensibility that mirrors his cultural background. Growing up in the San Francisco Bay Area, John was deeply influenced by the surrounding landscape and his upbringing as the child of immigrants from Germany and El Salvador. His paintings combine mixed media and symbolic imagery in unique ways that address ritual, relativity and identity.