Using natural forms with strong design characteristics, I create paintings that blend careful observation with fanciful invention. I am drawn to subjects expressing an extravagance in nature, such as orchids, lichens, corals and sponges. It is in these intricacies that the imagination is engaged and the subject matter is brought closer to the human eye. I find magic in the act of examining and enlarging these studies and making seen what is unseen. I spend countless hours fine-tuning my paintings to a deep sense of balance and resolve. Inspired by E. O. Wilson’s notion of “biophilia ” as an empathy towards all living things, my work is driven by a sense of intimacy and personal identification with the natural world. In my paintings, my experience of nature tends to express a sense of wonder and awe at the complexity of the web of life.     – Gary Brewer

Gary Brewer
Architecture of Becoming
2015
oil on canvas
36 x 52″

Francine Lecoultre is a mixed media artist: sculptor, painter and print maker.

Born in the French speaking Switzerland, she graduated in Art Education at the University of Bern, receiving her diploma in Costume Design from the Advanced Program of the Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandising in Los Angeles. Lecoultre’s creations are often inspired by nature and travels. They have a textured, organic, and tactile quality with multiple layers. She favors techniques built in superposition with care and precision, such as silkscreening, moulding, printmaking and paper art. The artist favors both simplicity and clarity – disclosing the wonder of nature in it’s unlimited magic. Francine’s interest in process and patina is evident in her collection of prints and sculptural pieces. She goes near obsessive lengths to recreate the effects of time and wear in the unique pieces and art commissions she has created around the world.

The Loft at Liz’s annual nature show has provided Francine the opportunity of expressing her multiple passions and her profound love of nature and plants, healthy food from the garden, and reminiscence of her childhood spent in a little Swiss village, close to Geneva Lake. Her corsets are handcrafted from paper, much like papyrus was fashioned by ancient Egyptians, utilizing plants harvested in both California and Switzerland. Living in Los Angeles since 1993, she has been involved in several top film productions as a Costume Designer and textile artist. From the middle ages, to futuristic fantasy, to the Italian Renaissance, Francine Lecoultre’s imagination travels throughout history. Francine’s corsets are the symbol for the respect of nature, health and food for the next generations. May we protect them.

Francine Lecoultre
Corset “Nini – Legs in the Air”
2015
Handmade paper: hay and graminées from Lake Geneva
11 x 16 x 9″

Carlo Marcucci
WHEATFIELDS LXIV
2007
Udon, squid ink spaghetti and porcini mushroom spaghetti applied on wood
Installed size: 32 x 12 x 3.5″

WHEATFIELDS Series

A series of wall-mounted sculptures made of different kinds of spaghetti and noodles. These minimal compositions are an abstract interpretation of food containers and the disproportionate role they have in modern processed food distribution. Each painted wood structure is covered with a very thin layer of dry spaghetti, glued strand by strand, one placed next to each other, row after row, to create a large three-dimensional linear mosaic. Some of the sculptures are designed as multiple units, created to incorporate the empty wall space between each section into an overall composition. The variations of colors arise from the different ingredients used in the manufacture of the pasta itself. Spinach spaghetti are green, chili pepper spaghetti are red, and black spaghetti owe their color to squid ink.  Some incorporate the use of intersecting structures made of transparent Plexiglas.  These dissecting plastic elements are abstract reminders of the spy windows used by many spaghetti manufacturers to exhibit the pasta within each carton container. The nature of the pasta in these works is drastically changed to a point that it loses its recognizable shape, texture and use. In a metaphorical sense, the box containing the spaghetti is thus reborn as a box constructed of spaghetti. The packaging becomes part of the buying experience – food becomes art and entertainment.

Carlo Marcucci
Altered Strawberries
1995
Acrylic and inks on canvas
42 x 67″

CHEMICAL STILL-LIFE Series

A series of paintings portraying food contamination by chemicals found within each produce/food depicted. These images deal with food production in an industrial society and the price we pay as consumers for our craving for blemish free produce. This all-year perfection comes at the expense of taste and, along with possible long-term consequences to our health, also affects our overall environment due to agricultural pollution. In still life painting, the subject matter is rarely important for its own sake; rather, it most often serves as a showcase for the artist’s compositional skill and ability to render detail and texture. My approach is to reverse the priority, by placing more emphasis on the subject matter rather than compositional skills. Each painting presents the viewer with a secret warning, a riddle of sorts, not meant to be understood by everyone. Most of us know about pesticides, but few of us really know how much we are exposed to and how dangerous some can be.

Raksha Parekh
The Great Wave 2012 / 2013
Cotton paper, burnt sugar
18 x 24” (panels) 120 x 90” (full)

Parekh’s artworks are created with organic materials that already possess a history and deep relationship with human needs and have shaped history and reshaped societies and even countries and landscapes at the most fundamental levels. These changed landscapes continue to shape our psyche and environment. They also incorporate a degree of belonging to the area of study that inspires her thoughts and experiences as both African and Indian diaspora. Burnt sugar, sugar cane, raw cotton, wood, cotton fabrics and other materials used in her installations serve as commentaries on commodities that continue to have a connection to the slave trade, indentured labor and colonialism. Parekh invites the viewer to consider the hands that deliver the commodities. Her mediums are her subject matter as well as her muse and story teller that lead a viewer to reflect on social structures that generate and fuel their consumption.

Catherine Ruane
Untitled (acorn)
2015
Charcoal and graphite
12 x 12″

 Zach Touchon
Synesthesia i / ii
2015
Mixed media collage on paper
Beets, balsamic, carrots, goat cheese, kale
15 x 11” (art) 34 x 26” (framed)

Synesthesia is a neurological phenomenon in which stimulation of one sensory or cognitive pathway leads to automatic, involuntary experiences in a second sensory or cognitive pathway.  Little is known of this correlation as researchers largely abandoned its study by the mid 20^th century.  Cases of synesthetic perception are reportedly low, though I believe them to be an inherently human experience – all of us experiencing synesthetic perception at some time in life and to varying degree.

A certain taste can transport us to another time or place, allowing memory to spark an entirely separate sensory experience, to us very real and present, such as sound or scent, though experiential recall is not necessary or exclusive to the phenomenon.  Synesthetic cognition manifests differently in each of us – some perceiving numbers or letters as specific colors.  While others experience number form synesthesia, wherein numerical values are correlated to spatial positioning.

As a visual study of synesthesia, I created works, in collaboration with chef Ken Novack (Citron Catering) that provided a means of collectively merging the viewers’ sensory perception – and to perhaps even invoke a potential synesthetic experience in those who “tasted” my painting during the exhibit’s opening reception.

Enjoy.     – Zach Touchon

 Ttozoi
TT_5057
2014
Natural molds and pigments on jute
36 x 75”

TTozoi is a pseudonym which brings together the creative experience of Pino Rossi (1972 – artist) and Stefano Forgione (1969 – architect) – are today advocates of a new kind of “absolute” informal. Or better, according to the definition they themselves give to their evocative philosophy, “naturally absolute”. The research project was founded in 2007 and, after several years of experimentation, he made his debut in 2010 with a major exhibition in Naples, in the exhibition halls of Castel dell ‘Ovo, curated by Prof. Luca Bueatrice, new curator of the Italian Pavilion at the Biennale Venice 2009. Thay mix conceptual art and form: TTozoi take a canvass (jute), and by canvass they mean not just a simple tool but real living matter, thus create an “environment” for painting, an unusual type of painting, a humus, time then does the rest automatically allowing the intervention on the part of the artist to prosper. The only real action on the part of the artist is to scatter (by four hands) organic matter over the canvas – be it, wather, flour –  pure pigment and then fire– that in time and under certain conditions, pressed under plex, generates spores, which are able to mould their own appearance beyond the confines and will of the very artist, which will determine the instant for always with the use of resins to spray. A creative alchemy, sensational, magical in its final product, because the natural principle, spontaneous and uncontrollable, is behind a drastic shifting of meaning towards matter, understood to be the principle and aim of the work. Nature, the principle of indefiniteness, non-form, non-gesture. TTozoi’s philosophy seems to go hand in hand with the ecological, environmental and natural universe, by means of a judgement subtended to the modern. Closer to an Oriental sensitiveness, that of the ancient pottery tradition raku for example, the moulds on canvass of TTozoi are stylistically children of the expressionist abstractionism of the Gutai group – the most important post-war Japanese avant-garde – and find adhesion of meaning in the words of the founder Yoshihara Jiro bent on “giving matter an opportunity to live”. In TTozoi’s work above and beyond a criticism we see a delicate operation of raising the work of art to an abstract, conceptual and still material lyricism. Intervention on the part of the artist is reduced to a minimum, the creative force is given back to the silent evolution of organic matter, “nature”, in the strict sense of the word, is left to operate freely. Nature is a subject dear to artists, inflated maybe, but here brought back to clear, pure examination, devoid of frills and pomposity. Reread with a feeling which disarms intuition. Artistic gesture is cancelled and nature, normally annihilated, is given back its primordial creative value. Moulds on canvass highlighted the connection between art and nature, where the artist’s manipulation deconstruct the context and biological character of natural evolution: that is the ability to proliferate and multiply, to invade a certain territory and deform it, to transform an area degrading it or, from a different point of view, conferring value upon it. TTozoi’s work thus breaks away from other experiences and becomes a particularly interesting case, above all as it overturns two cardinal problems of modern times. The first is the view of life buried under the anguished cupola of memento mori; the second is the ‘to do’ dictatorship. In a society where man has always to do his best to use every single moment of the day in the most practical way, to compress his time, where it is thought that beauty and comfort must be built and are part of the work-spend consumer lifestyle, TTozoi create artworks founded on the wait philosophy and on the confidence that things will work themselves out because this is the tendency and perfection of the universe. More than a new philosophy, it is a classic philosophy that has been rediscovered and that exposes the modern myth of speed and productivity. Thus the definition of time that Sophocle gave is rediscovered, describing it as a “kind god”, but also that of Kierkegaard who said that “expectation is an arrow that flies and that remains embedded in the target”.