Recent inventory at Peng Gallery

Work Titles:

Search, The Bliss, Last Horizon, and Mountain Series #18

 

Hisako Kobayashi works intuitively, creating dreamlike landscapes that suggest ambient states indicative of both landscape and feeling. Both Search and The Bliss assert a subtle glow that shifts in the viewer’s eye like the slightest ripple of water. Poetic and haunting, Search shows us that her pentamenti are born of emotion, in which depth of vision and feeling become similar to the point of unity. In this work Kobayashi shows us that she brilliantly combines her Asian sensibility with her Western training. The Bliss, remarkable for its soft sifts of color, opens up for contemplation of its subtleties, which demand extended interaction and an open mind. Together, the paintings meditate, in Asian fashion, upon the ineffable, but they also show Kobaysahi’s profound understanding of Western painting.

 

Murray Dessner paints large canvases filled with color and light. He is a painter who reaches, in the abstract expressionist manner, for the abstract sublime; however, his thick applications of paint also display a nuanced feeling for landscape. In Last Horizon, we see the marvelous gradations of color that express the way the day ends—beginning with a luminous yellow at the bottom of the canvas, gradually changing from yellow to orange to a fiery red in the top half of the composition. Like Rothko’s paintings, Last Horizon can be understood in two basic ways—as brilliant records of the light in a landscape, and as equally accomplished explorations in color-field abstraction. Both readings work successfully, proving Dessner to be a highly accomplished painter in his field.

 

Quan Handong is a Chinese painter intent on contemporizing the great tradition of Chinese ink painting. In the vertical, scroll-like work Mountain Series #18, Quan brilliantly approximates the effects of a mountainous landscape, reiterating ink forms with small spots of color. These vertically rising shapes are presented randomly across the white paper, creating a pleasing, contrapuntal rhythm that make them seem nearly as though they are dancing. Of course, the effects may also be read as abstract, black knots of brush marks that randomly repeat themselves. Quan’s painting reminds us that even when the Chinese image suffices in its realism, abstraction is part of the equation.