In All and One, Andrew Falkowki’s fifth one artist exhibition with Rosamund Felsen Gallery, several series of paintings are presented that examine the relationship between studio production and media output.

Materials and visual styles from popular culture and Pop Art are sourced as bold colors and familiar designs are used. Synecdoche, a painting series consisting of tight tablet sized grids, owe as much to Excel spreadsheets as to running shoe designs. Here, deviations from predetermined parameters are exemplified through color choices and placement. In another painting, sharing the same name of the show All and One, reference is made to Roy Lichtenstein’s early pop work through the tactility of a ben-day dot pattern.

Minimalist monochromatic paintings, created from milk paint and sheets of cell cast acrylic plexiglass, make nods to both car culture and industrial fabrication. In a separate series of color field paintings, undulating clouds of amorphous, saturated color are rendered from chroma sprayed on small panels. And in his text paintings, strong graphic images and collaged text in various fonts reveal the text as a physical form distinct from its meaning, while contexts are toyed with and manipulated.

Using art theory along with its language and structure, this wide range of abstract and text paintings are excursions into and out of these parameters.
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For Les Biller’s second show at Rosamund Felsen Gallery, lonesome Los Angeles cityscape paintings are juxtaposed with narrative paintings composed from mythology, reality and fantasy.
Rich and decadent colors tell stories of the subjects in the narrative paintings, opening with still lifes in beautiful spaces. A bust of Emperor Nero causes his wife pregnant wife Poppaea to be aghast as a nearby figure stands checking her smartphone. While in another large painting, beautiful objects obscure the view of a serene body of water with monkeys swinging jubilantly overhead. These compositions are unique and humorous, at times enigmatic.
If the narrative paintings are an exercise of cognition, then the cityscapes are of the emotions. Void of people, the yearning cityscapes depict views of Los Angeles that only a sensitive wanderer would notice – the moment right before the beach appears, the tender stillness on the side of the road looking through an underpass, the glory of a sunset on a hillside peering over the vast wonder of the L.A. sprawl, or the awe of proud skyscrapers from beyond the barbed wire of South L.A.