ART CITIES:Los Angeles-Lauren Quin

Drawing from a pool of the unformed and the entropic, Lauren Quin renders shapes caught in a process of emergence or recession. Parts grow out of other parts. And like bacteria, material starts to infect and invade. Her mark-making implies a passage between or network among dimensions that generate sensuality and movement. They reveal a nimble boundary between fetish and foul, blood and marrow, purity and perversion.

By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Blum & Poe Gallery Archive

Lauren Quin presents her solo exhibition “Pulse Train Howl”. Reflecting Quin’s zealously layered canvases, the exhibition’s title draws from patterns of electrical spikes in the nervous system as well as a wolfpack’s long-range communication, evoking the artist’s rhythmic—almost sonic—synchronized symbols and combinations of mark making. The artist’s paintings are initially built from a shape that is repeated and overlapped. This layering process creates a multitude of compositional center points as well as other forms that appear in the residual spaces. Each painting is also topped with motifs derived from Quin’s drawing archive—a spider, a hand, the sun, a needle—that she transfers onto the canvas with a meticulously honed monoprinting technique. As the artist uses her symbols again and again, they grow from a personally sourced visual language into a collective, cultural unconscious—the meaning expands and erodes, taking on a life of its own as each viewer forms their own attachment to these works. Quin’s compositions are also built from a form that she calls the tube: a key trope in her oeuvre. These thick strips of color and shadow resemble volumetric prisms. When overlapping, they morph into a shifting crosshatch or moiré pattern. Quin’s tubes are both the most persistently recurring and the least stable element of her compositions; they play tricks with the consistency of their weight and value. Toward the end of Quin’s process, she lays down a heavy layer of paint that she must act upon quickly, carving into it before it can set. The artist describes this portion of her production as athletic, nimble, and dictated by the passage of time. In this carving process, Quin formulates a new argument for abstraction that is not about hard edges, clean lines, or brute force. The source forms are connected by their shared structural repetition, offering rings or appendages that spiral and curl inward like mangled paws. Repeated in acts of self-reference, the forms fuse into tentacles, tubes, and tunnels while moving outward in rippling moiré patterns. A pattern of iridescent scales serves as a base layer or underpainting. Revealed later through a process of removal, the partial tubes of color are also repeated closer to the paintings’ surfaces. These spirited prismatic flakes curl like fractured ribbons as they flicker with reflective luminosity. Close up, the minced curves float like soft clicks. From further away, they crystallize into a beating surge of tumultuous energy. Moments of blurred, spinning entropy guide the momentum of marks like a drain’s vortex. On top of and within the patterned layers, buoyant biomorphic masses in vivid, fleshy colors hover on top of and within the patterned layers. Dancing within the thresholds of liminal space and warping depth perception via variation of scale, the snaking tubes and tunnels imply no clear delineation between exteriors and interiors. Once the composition is established, the layers filling all possible negative space, Quin commences the time-sensitive process of wiping, carving, and etching her imagery into the surface to reveal contrasting colors underneath, repeating the imagery to a rippling effect. The traces in the wet paint range from the thickness of a finger to the thinness of a nimble etch mark—resulting in radiating waves that start with a quiver and climax in a throb. The final element of Quin’s ocular alphabet is introduced in luminous dispersed lines of various weights repeating aforementioned symbols. Through a monoprinting process, the source images are regenerated in crackling flairs of light. While the speckled ink acts as light bouncing off the volumetric tubes, delicate and sparkling cross-hatching provides yet another avenue for depth-building. As certain layers can only be executed within windows of drying time, the paintings inherit an immediate and urgent physicality. After establishing a painting’s foundation in this time-sensitive process of cumulative and retractive mark-making, Quin develops each painting’s individual sensibility on its own terms. Conversing within the layers of scaled patterns, morphing limb-like forms, carved drawings, and sizzling lines, the techniques are repeated, tempered, and pulled forward, following each unique rhythm to completion. Regulating layers to the pace of each work, forms are brought to the forefront—mining ever greater depths and rendering pattern as both a stable form and slippery void.

Photo: Lauren Quin, Blonde Rattle, 2022, Oil on canvas, 72 x 120 x 1 1/2 inches, © Lauren Quin, Photo: Josh Schaedel, Courtesy the artist and Blum & Poe Gallery

Info: Blum & Poe Gallery, 2727 South La Cienega Boulevard, Los Angeles, CA, USA, Duration: 14/5-25/6/2022, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, www.blumandpoe.com/