Masako Kamiya: New Paintings

Stuart Ober: Mistakes, I've Made a Few

September 4 - October 6 at Gallery NAGA

Launching its thirty-first season of exhibitions (!), Gallery NAGA presents two mid-career artists with thoroughly different approaches to painting who are perhaps similar only in the pleasure they find in delicately balanced color relationships.

Masako Kamiya: New Paintings and Stuart Ober: Mistakes, I’ve Made a Few, both run from September 4 through October 6. A reception for the artists and the public will be held at the gallery on Friday, September 7 from 6 to 8 pm. During the past several years MASAKO KAMIYA has attracted much attention in the Boston art scene for her modestly-sized and taciturn accumulations of thousands and thousands of daubs of paint, which strike many viewers as exhilarating cascades of visual information. Her surfaces are thoroughly populated by tiny dots of color, and many of these droplets are built atop one another, constructing tiny stalagmites of paint that spike forward toward the viewer.

In her newest paintings, which Kamiya describes as “a more experimental body of work,” the topography of her surfaces has changed. What was a more evenly distributed array of peaks of consistent height is now a terrain of clustered towers here and low valleys there. More than ever the works seem aerial and vast.

“They’re almost risk-takingly higher,” Kamiya says. “I’m really interested in the highly developed textures. The perceptions are very different as a result. You have to walk through the surface to perceive the color relationships, more the way you experience sculpture. For me, it’s almost more like making an object. It’s an interesting question. I am painting, but I’m also making an object.”

Those familiar with Kamiya’s work will also notice a softer palette. “There’s less bright color,” she says, “actually there’s less color. I like the way the color shifts very, very quietly. That’s intriguing to me.”

For thirty years STUART OBER has practiced his own self-taught approach to representational painting, one that combines a deadpan illusionism with a not quite fathomable psychic undertone. “Underneath them all lies passive-aggressive behavior,” he jokes.

Ober has created a defining image over the past several years. It is a meticulously rendered environment in which the implied back story involves a mishap whose consequences we confront – chairs in a heap at the base of a stairwell or a paint spill on an oriental rug.

His newest work continues in this direction. We are again invited to take delectation in the visually enjoyable appearance of what seems to be an accident’s aftermath. But in this body of work, Ober also moves from the theater of his interior space, approaches the window, and goes outside.

In Elephant and Mouse in Winter, a cold landscape in repose is viewed through the window, its sill animated by figures of Mickey Mouse and Ganesha, one of the prime Hindu deities, lord of success and destroyer of obstacles. We have an enduring exterior but maybe not an untroubled one, framed as it is by a polarity of icons who suggest, as Ober puts it, “a certain tension.”

In View of Haarlem with the Great Tornado of 1668, Ober goes out the window all the way to the Netherlands, in an altered version of Jacob Van Ruisdael’s painting of a burg under a commanding sky. Here it’s not back story. We’re viewing before the disaster, as the twister tears through the fields and heads toward the town. Our sense of the peril, “the preciousness of the world,” as Ober remarked, is balanced by how interesting it looks. As usual with Ober, there’s the narrative, and then there’s enjoying its attractive face.