Blue Haze, 2012 Acrylic on linen, 42 x 36 in.
Today I am marveling at the new paintings by Barbara Takenaga now showing at the Gregory Lind Gallery in San Francisco. Using only circles and lines, the artist takes the viewer through a dizzying psychedelic journey. Although Takenaga’s abstractions are at first reminiscent of Op-Art, they go far beyond the reliance of flat shapes to create optical illusions. Using multi-layered depths and effects which simulate outward expanding and inward contracting vortexes, the paintings conjure up organic life forms as well as celestial structures.
From the gallery’s press release: “Takenaga’s drawings and paintings expand on the artist’s oeuvre of provocative cosmic topographies, which evoke the vital interplay between matter and energy, order and entropy… In this series, Takenaga includes her signature light-saturated, reflective surfaces and an opalescent palette of pulsing color schemes that often radiate out from a vanishing point in multifarious swirls, evoking landscapes and mirrored images… Her painstaking precision and references to larger processes in nature are, then, an apt visual metaphor for the cosmic energies that pervade our space in both obvious and undetected ways.”
These new paintings by Barbara Takenaga will be showing at the Gregory Lind Gallery through June 30, 2012.
Minus Red, 2012 Acrylic on wood panel, 24 x 20 in.
Rave On, 2012 Acrylic on wood panel, 24 x 20 in.
Small Reprise (rise/fall), 2012 Acrylic on wood panels, Triptych 24 x 72 in.
Untitled (red swoop), 2012 Acrylic on paper, 8 x 6 in.
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