LOS ANGELES, CA.- as-is.la is presenting the exhibition “Paul Tzanetopoulos: Silk Series.” The show opened July 30 and continues through September 10. “Paul Tzanetopoulos: Silk Series” is presented in conjunction with “Katy Crowe: A Wrinkle in the Macula.”
The centerpiece of “Paul Tzanetopoulos: Silk Series” is four hand-painted, rear-lit, wall-mounted painting constructions occupying two walls of the ever-so-slightly darkened main gallery. The show continues upstairs where similar plaid pattern imagery is presented in a wider array of “packaging,” so to speak: a vintage microfiche reader, video loops, a manual typewriter and, even, paint on canvas.
A famous and beloved Los Angeles artist once characterized Paul Tzanetopoulos as our city’s “best kept secret,” this both despite and because of early exhibitions at historically important institutions such as LAICA and the fabled Richard Kuhlenschmidt Gallery, not to mention his co-authorship of the glowing light towers marking the entry to LAX. Is the Paul Tzanetopoulos secret safe with us? Maybe yes. Maybe no. Either way, this exhibition at as-is.la offers the wider audience fresh reason to recognize an achievement others have long appreciated.
This tightly focused exhibition consists of four medium-sized (52 x 40”) oil on linen paintings and a single smaller (16 x 22”) painting, all executed between 2019 and 2022. Here, irregular geometric shapes—often full or partial circles—jostle against passages of vivid if loosely applied paint color, resolving in a tense if finally stable equilibrium.
Crowe is too young to be a part of the generation of abstract painters who memorably declared that “the problems of painting are to be solved on the canvas.” But like them, she proceeds according to a method that is equal parts invention and discovery. An openness to possibility combined with a faith in human subjectivity can be a lonely place from which to operate, particularly now. Crowe however is undeterred. Indeed, it may be this very persistence that, when wedded to her subtly alluring imagery, give Crowe’s paintings their mysterious if undeniable power.
