April 1, 2012

THE HUFF POST ARTS

 

    

       YVETTE GELLIS, Sylmar, 2011, Mixed media on canvas, 108 x 168 inches

 

WHAT:

Garboushian

427 North Camden Drive, Beverly Hills

Through Aug. 27.

 

HAIKU REVIEW: Yvette Gellis determines an unsettling condition in her paintings, one in which a clearly urban environment becomes so taken up by its own dynamism that it begins to disintegrate. Perceived space warps in and out, elements of architecture and function become vehicles for disorientation, and the world becomes a fever dream at once exhilarating and frightening, a continual cascade through light, paint, and maddeningly familiar but never clear form. Dependent on the brushstroke, on purely structural terms Gellis' work is almost abstract expressionist; lord knows there are enough passages of pure painterly virtuosity. But the representational - specifically urban - references are so insistent, and the rendition of depth so convincingly vertigo-inducing, that it's impossible to describe these often huge canvases as "abstract" at all. Whatever else they are, they are quite a ride - and not only for the eyes.

                                                                                            -Peter Frank