There are just a few days left to visit Renée Gertler’s radiant solo show at K. Imperial Fine Art, a show that’s only been open by appointment since its May 8 opening. Let me digress for a moment. This “by appointment” business is a bit of a pet peeve for me. Requiring previous know-how is antithetical to the delight that is artistic discovery.
People visiting 49 Geary — where Fraenkel, Euqinom and other galleries still hold court — should be able to stumble across Gertler’s work; puzzle through its lines, curves and glowing sprays of color; think about waves of energy; and emerge, I predict, a bit lighter.
Becoming Light, the title of Gertler’s show, offers the first puzzle. Is it “light” as in weight, or “light” as in the visible spectrum? There is an airiness to most of the work on view: ink, colored pencil and acrylic on 30-inch wide sheets of paper. Celestine Vibrations, vertical lines flanked by red and blue airbrushed curves, wobbles and shimmers.
When these drawings get dense, as in the case of A Deep Churning, a motion-filled sea of small marks that conjure a murmuration of starlings, they become portals. Less terrestrial, more cosmic.
Gertler is partial to a cornea-sizzling ultramarine blue, which forms the ground for her works on panel and coats her plaster sculptures. The latter, comfortably scaled, exist somewhere between objets d’art, architectural maquettes and unclassifiable useful things.
