Review: Your invitation to dreamland awaits at Ad Minoliti’s exhibition at Cherry and Martin gallery
Step into Ad Minoliti’s exhibition at the gallery Cherry and Martin in Culver City, and you feel like you’re drifting through a stranger’s daydream — something better than getting lost in your own reveries. The Buenos Aires-based artist’s whip-smart installation plays host so graciously that its whimsies seem to be yours, but not yours alone.
Everything that unfolds in “Geometrical Sci-Fi Cyborg 2.0†(also called “G.S.F.C. 2.0â€) results from discrete elements intermingling.
The fun starts with the paintings. Minoliti uses stencils to spray-paint canvases. She then photographs her airy compositions, digitally prints the images on other canvases, stretches those canvases and applies more paint. If Wassily Kandinsky came back to life as a middle-school girl wickedly skilled at designing wallpaper, the compositions, palette and touch would resemble Minoliti’s.
The mischievousness continues in the photographs, each of which transforms a Julius Shulman picture of a classic Midcentury house into a jocular collage that pays homage to its source by reanimating its original insouciance.
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The mix-it-up promiscuity hits a high note with the goofy cartoon murals Minoliti has painted on the gallery walls. Their stark shapes, depicting disembodied legs, wandering eyeballs, a hungry triangle and a happy circle, keep seriousness at arm’s length — without diminishing Minoliti’s ambitions, which are big.
A realistic chicken, perched on an oversized egg (a la Dr. Seuss) is the cherry on top of Minoliti’s playful romp through styles and scales, painting and printing, abstraction and architecture, analog and digital.
And that’s not all. The consummate host, Minoliti has made room in her exhibition for a monitor that plays “Mood Rings, Crystals and Opal Colored Stones,†a lyrical video by Zadie Xa, as well as a pair of gorgeous silk cushions — and matching feather-stuffed bolsters — by Yaoska Davila. On each comfy seat reclines a small painting by Minoliti, its abstract eye seemingly riveted to Xa’s dreamy video.
Minoliti riffs off artists she admires and invites others into the party.
Cherry and Martin, 2712 S. La Cienega Blvd., L.A. Through Nov. 4; closed Sundays and Mondays. (310) 559-0100, www.cherryandmartin.com
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