Aaron Noble, Craig Kucia
July 6 – August 31, 2002
Santa Monica
Opening reception Saturday, July 6, 3–6pm
Music by DJ MULLDOZER
Blum & Poe is pleased to announce a two person exhibition of new painting from artists Aaron Noble and Craig Kucia.
Aaron Noble is best know for his large-scale, public murals of amalgamated superhero forms. Utilizing an intuitive process of collage, Noble pieces together fragments of comic book illustrations with a surgeon-like precision to form intimate studies for his ultimately monumental works. Through this process of extraction and re-integration, Noble creates strained and contorted biomorphic forms that are at once muscular and virile like Marvel's exaggerated comic book super-heroes, yet also uncharacteristically delicate and fragile. For this exhibition, the artist has scaled-down his work for the first time, resulting in several new paintings that keenly reflect their collage origins.
Craig Kucia's painings also display a sense of fragility, but one that is focused around nature's interior. His scenes consist of lush grasses and wild flowers that are populated by butterflies, caterpillars, and birds. Formal issues of painting come into play as the bird's nest is broken down into abstract lines, and flowers are truncated by the canvas' edge. Kucia carefully constructs a balance between representing nature's minutia, and indulging in colorful abstraction. The paintings suggest an extension of nature, while still reaffirming a strong belief in painting.