Past Exhibition

Daniel Aksten

Material

September 9 – October 10, 2010
Opening Reception: Sunday, September 12, 5 – 7 p.m.

CB1 Gallery presented Material, a solo show of the work of Los Angeles artist, Daniel Aksten. Material continues the artist’s ongoing series of highly finished grid paintings while adding an additional body of work focusing on vertical stripes. The exhibition opened on September 9 for the downtown LA Art Walk and close on October 10, 2010.

Scrutinizing optics and the painting itself, under Southern California’s patented sunshine, Daniel Aksten forges mathematical structure, chance, and an astonishing degree of craft to produce paintings that challenge the viewer to re-examine how much one thinks they can actually see.

Best known for his fastidious paintings of geometric solids composed by chance through a system involving the roll of a die, Aksten’s Material introduces an additional form to his visual vocabulary, extending the exploration of contrast, color and reflection. Vertical stripes, like vertical blinds on a sliding glass door obscure former layers, interposing inside onto outside of painterly space.

A trademark element has become the round-cornered textured screen which finishes and haunts each work like the faint awareness of our own blind spot, reminding us that everything we see is surrounded by the expanding and shrinking flesh visage of our own countenance.

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