LOS ANGELES, CA.- LAUNCH Gallery is presenting the solo exhibitions by artists whose work is defined by their monochromatic paintings in black. Both Todd Carpenter and Tom Pazderka examine landscape painting through use of materials and techniques that heighten and enhance the relationships and interactions among natural forces, history, science, and humanity. Todd Carpenter presents complex themes through richly detailed oil paintings examining landscapes in their natural and majestic stillness. While Tom Pazderka’s medium of paint and ash portrays the natural world violently disrupted by powerful forces of both nature and man.
Todd Carpenter returns for his fifth solo exhibition with LAUNCH Gallery since 2010, continuing his deep exploration of our landscapes and humanity’s place in it. While Todd’s paintings, in either urban or wilderness settings, radiate the positive energy of a healthy and inhabited environment, they never include creatures of any kind. Thanks to our advanced conscious and subconscious minds, we are able to interpret the black, white and gray scale imagery as a colorful, robust and lively vista.
My paintings attempt to capture this unconscious connection between humans and places. In particular, I focus on the features that are most effective at conveying the feel of a landscape, and to this end I break scenes down, dissecting them to find the essential organs that give life to land. The subjects become simplified, reduced to the factors that appeal to our genes, as I search for the features that are most intriguing. I concentrate on characteristics such as the subtle shadings of light, the fragments of perspective we don’t consciously see, or the angle of the lines under our feet, as I strive to paint distillations of light and atmosphere, and condensates of shadow, awe, and fear.
Light itself is often the principle subject of my paintings, for frequently it is light that tells us about the dimensionality of a place, while at the same time light is what makes a scene evocative, infusing even the mundane with feeling. It imparts places with atmosphere and intrigue, watering the seeds of our memory with vagaries of shadow that imbue a view with mystery.
My paintings thus examine our attachment to our surroundings, attempting to capture the ability of landscapes to evoke something in our sense of being. They are about place: not particular places, but the more generic idea of place, the place in our ancient past that our minds are searching for. I am trying to depict our niche, our sense of the world as it relates to our sense of self, the unconscious link between the mind and the environment. These are the brains hidden scenes, forgotten by us but remembered in our genes.
Similarly awestruck by the splendor of nature in all its manifestations of beauty and complexity, Tom Pazderka pays homage to it by documenting its energy and power. In 2016, Tom began photographing and collecting ash of local California wildfires. Combining ash with white oil paint on wood panels that he burned and charred with torches, Tom painted the pyrocumulous ash clouds produced by fires. Applied in thin layers, systematically, over long periods, the images emerge out of the ashy abyss. The subject matter of this body of work has slowly has begun to expand as Tom’s curiosity about human and natural power grows along with his command of this unique medium.
For this exhibition, I wanted to explore the similarities between human technology and the forces of nature, to put the atomic bomb explosion on a similar footing with an exploding volcano or a massive wildfire, not so much for their magnitude, but for the awe, reverence and fear they inspire. That an exhibition of ash clouds and explosions coincides with one of the worst wildfire disasters in Los Angeles history is not lost on me. In the ten years I’ve lived in Southern California I’ve had close calls with the raging fury of fires. They are dangerous, and often apocalyptic and today an ever present reality waiting to erupt at any moment. It is that strange ‘subconscious’ of the Southern California landscape that continues to inspire my work.
Tom Pazderka is a Czech American painter, installation artist, writer, and curator. His work interrogates ideology, nostalgia, loss, and belonging using a black-and-white palette of ash and oil. Pazderka’s solo exhibitions include Gallery 825 (Los Angeles, CA), Bender Gallery (Asheville, NC), Silo118 (Santa Barbara, CA) and The Basic Premise (Ojai, CA) with group exhibitions at Santa Monica Art Museum, Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts in Beverly Hills, Bardo Fine and Performing Arts Center in Cullowhee, NC, Sullivan Goss Gallery in Santa Barbara, Beatrice Wood Center for the Arts in Ojai and the Santa Barbara Center for Art Science and Technology.
As Curator for the Santa Barbara County Office of Arts and Culture, Tom engages the county community and artists to produce and exhibit art in public spaces and galleries. Prior to serving as County Office of Arts and Culture Curator, he served as our Lead Preparator and Exhibitions Designer since 2017. He also held significant roles with the UCSB Art, Design and Architecture Museum, Santa Barbara Museum of Art, and Museum of Contemporary Art Santa Barbara.
Todd Carpenter uses black and white paint to examine the capacity of landscape paintings to convey the sense of places. He holds a MS in Neuroscience and a BS in Psychobiology, and brings this background into service when making art. His paintings explore the mechanisms of perception and aesthetics, probing the relationships between humans and our environment by examining concepts such as how the depiction of light can impart realism and mood. Before becoming a full-time artist Carpenter worked in the sciences, and in the past has taught neuroscience, environmental science, and photography. He currently teaches painting through the community education program at Santa Monica College. He is based in southern California.
