Robert Goodman and Hiro Sakaguchi may seem like a surprising pairing. Their paint application and their content are soooo far apart. But perhaps that’s why the two of them at Seraphin Gallery, until Oct. 7, do not step on one another’s toes.
Zzip detail
Robert Goodman: Night Vision is painting as fireworks. The abstractions have a feeling of spontaneity and the look of the urban, neon landscape captured by a camera in motion. They have depth and space, they have light, they have detail and they have a marvelous sense of juicy painterly marksmanship. Although they have the motion I associate de Kooning’s and Pollock’s abstract expressionism, they are cooler. Goodman manages to mix beauty and edginess all at once!
Goodman is a Tyler MFA. He had a Fleisher Challenge exhibition last year.
Hiro Sakaguchi, Wind, Flower and Farewell #2, 2006
21 x 16, synthetic polymer paint on canvas
As juicy, abstract and explosive Goodman’s work is, the work in Hiro Sakaguchi: Traveler’s Tale is personal and low-key. Sakaguchi continues his dreamy, washy drawings on canvas, telling over and over again the story of his emigration from Japan to the U.S., using repeating motifs. Sakaguchi uses a fragile unpainterliness that’s closer to the watercolor-and-ink travel journal tradition than to works on canvas–a coating of Japanese brush traditions atop the coarse canvas. But unlike the work in travel journals, the narrative here is less of discovery than of a sense of loss.
Sakaguchi was a 2004 Fleisher Challenge winner with an MFA from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.
The walls rained little red dots for both of these exhibits!
