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recent shows
PORTLAND
Hap Tivey / Gregg Renfrow
at
Elizabeth Leach Gallery
Elizabeth Leach’s recent
pairing of light sculptor Hap Tivey and painter Gregg Renfrow
at her gallery was an inspired one. Both artists hail from the
Southern California Light and Space movement of the 1960s and
1970s: a sun-drenched marriage of minimalism and color-field
painting promulgated most notably by James Turrell, and born
of the expansive vistas for which the Golden State is
renowned. In his show “Sands of the Ganges,” the Portland-born
Tivey (who lived for many years in L.A. before relocating to
New York) delivered a mesmerizing étude on light, shadow and
color. His painted canvases are backlit by LED (light-emitting
diode) lights and glow with preternatural saturation. For
several years Tivey studied at a Buddhist monestary in Japan,
and indeed the works can induce a certain Zen-like blissed-out
state, with their inscrutable interplay of form and
formlessness, and of vaguely recognizable shapes juxtaposed
with mysterious shadows. Some of the works have a muscular
sense of organic geometry (one sees a hint of Robert
Motherwell in Sand Grain and Jules Olitski in Galaxy
Particles), while works such as Wavelength of Speech are more
lyrical and oblique, evoking the amplitudes of sound waves, or
more poetically, the aurora borealis. Marks No Marks shows its
minimalist lineage in its blue and yellow halves separated by
an unforgiving dividing line, while Tathagata is the show’s
one misstep: its silhouetted humanoid form seemed an
over-literal attempt at lily-gilding.
Bay Area artist
Gregg Renfrow credits Raphael for the inspiration for his
current body of work. As he tells it, he was in London’s
National Gallery standing in front of Saint Catherine of
Alexandria, when he was overcome by the sensation “of pure
pleasure in my body.” Aiming in his own work to reconstitute
an overall chromatic impression of Raphael’s painting, Renfrow
has created moody, impressionistic atmospheres in polymer,
pigment, and cast acrylic: media that appear to drip off of
the paintings’ sides and turn to glass or resin, as if
flash-frozen at the moment of congealment. The works’
refreshingly prosaic titles—Maroon over Yellow;
Green-Yellow-Green—show the artist’s concern for form and
color qua content. Together, Renfrow’s and Tivey’s works
celebrate a “groovy-baby-far-out” retro sensibility that is
once again au courant as a new crop of gallery-goers, weaned
on glowing rectangles and the pretty colors that come out of
them, find fresh seduction in the visceral tricks two
California old-timers can pull out of their own glow-boxes and
pleasure swoons.
–Richard Speer
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