Adam Beris: Soft Bananas

LOS ANGELES | Solo Exhibition November 4 - January 20, 2017

Fabien Castanier Gallery is excited to announce our next solo exhibition in Los Angeles, Soft Bananas, featuring new work from LA-based artist Adam Beris. For his first solo show in Los Angeles, Beris will present paintings that are sculptural in nature, using his technique of applying pigment directly from tube to surface to examine a variety of contemporary themes.

Forgoing traditional modes of application, Beris instead constructs his subject matter in a way that emphasizes the substance. By applying paint directly from the tube, he re-interprets the utilization of his medium in a playful degradation of a material that holds an immeasurable art historical weight – a bastardization. The paintings for this exhibition confront the medium’s ingredients, canvas and specifically oil paint, a product that takes many forms depending on application, a characteristic that Beris exercises in order to challenge the viewer’s perspective on painting itself.

The works are studies on varying subject matter – short fictions, scenes and observations from the everyday, parables and mythologies. Each piece reflects its theme in the tactile essence of the substance with paint dollops forming tangible objects on the canvas, piles laid out and set-down with purpose in the composition. Beris pushes out of his paint tubes, faces, objects, symbols, and landscapes. Some pieces reference specific histories, while others display a seemingly codified language of icons that sit in neat rows as if presented on a collector’s shelf. He tackles themes of communication and the subjective nature of language and symbology, as well as contemporary identity in our current historical moment.