13ThingsLA: June 10
Mind, Body, Fútbol for your art calendar
We play some beautiful art games this week, with way more than just head and heart at stake. Exhibitions and events that really want to know what it’s all made of and how it all works—several of which also usher in summer group show season—happen at Luis De Jesus Los Angeles, Michael Kohn Gallery, Carpenters Workshop Gallery, MAK Center Schindler House, Parker Gallery, Izzy Lee Gallery, Choice Curations, Charlotte Call Gallery, Open Mind Art Space X after/time, Official Welcome Gallery, Foyer-LA, ICA LA, and an artful World Cup watch party in West Adams.
FEATURE
Evita Tezeno: Coming Home: A Gathering of Voices opens Sunday, June 14, noon-3pm at Luis De Jesus Los Angeles. Tezeno’s work has an enchanted quality, with her scenes of daily Black American life bursting with so much kaleidoscopic color and pattern that it’s a marvel it remains so clear and detailed in its intimate, theatrical portraiture and placemaking. From joy and sadness to romance and regret, silence and celebration, in with family or out in the world—the paintings communicate ideas about resourceful resilience and universal humanist themes inside a visual vernacular rooted in a specific time and place. At the same time, her technique asks larger questions like “What even is a painting?” because she works by first hand-rendering thousands of color fields and intricate patterns on paper and canvas, before cutting those up as raw material for the “collages” we see before us. This sits perfectly in depictions of textiles, landscapes, and architecture—but it deepens into an emotional, mysterious effect when it comes to her faces and hands, and the places where the bodies differentiate from their surroundings and claim their own likenesses and psychologies within the compositions are like topographies requiring further exploration. In some ways the story of how she works is as fascinating as the life stories she is telling. On view downtown through August 15; luisdejesus.com. —SND
