OCHI is pleased to present Machine Memory Brain, an exhibition by Los Angeles-based artist Rives Granade, on view in Los Angeles, CA from May 21 through July 2, 2022. This is Granade’s fourth solo exhibition with the Gallery. An Artist’s Reception will be held on Saturday May 21st from 5:00 to 8:00 pm PST.

Machine Memory Brain features gestural and energetic works on canvas that embrace the visual languages of drawing as they absorb fragments and ephemera from the artist’s daily life. At the core of Granade’s practice he charismatically evokes complexities in the studio, creating fields of paradoxical legibility and opacity—transcribing found forms into rhythmic meditations on existentialism brimming with characters, shapes, and symbols. Granade’s engagement with abstraction through time has been decidedly self-referential—abstract painting swallowing its own tail—and has more recently become Granade’s means of personal expression—a catch-all for stray thoughts, notes to self, appointments, and biblio- and biographical footnotes. Like the paintings in the Caves of Lascaux and the graffiti carved into the Temple of Poseidon, Granade explores an array of strategies to mark time, annotate, layer, echo, and prove his own existence.

Granade’s latest paintings foster a spirit of colorlessness. A muted palette of pink, yellow, and blue tints function like afterimages resulting from staring into the sun. Browns like smeared clay sit next to colors that mimic raw canvas and a smudgy array of graphite, charcoal, or soot grays. Created over the past two years, this distinct shift in mood can be attributed to a period spent relearning how to draw and paint after a camping accident permanently damaged mobility in his hand. During the monotonous process of healing from injury, Granade embraced a simplicity of material and vision as he wandered deeper into the ever-expanding possibilities of abstraction.

Always in dialogue with the history of Western Modernism, Granade also draws inspiration from Chinese ink painting, architectural plans, Japanese woodblock prints, Taoist talismans, and his four-year-old daughter’s scribbles and sketches. In layering and compressing drawing upon drawing, overlapping graphite and oil, Granade produces new maps of thought. Each mark exposes the vulnerability of the mind who made it and an unreliability of the body. Occupying positions between the conscious and unconscious—visions, thoughts, desires, memories, and dreams—a life-long practice of communication and obfuscation hold steady in Granade’s fluid representations of countless internal selves.

Rives Granade (b. 1979, Mobile, AL) received a BA in philosophy from Washington and Lee University and an MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute. Granade’s work has been exhibited internationally at venues including the Underground Museum, M+B, and Harmony Murphy Gallery in Los Angeles, CA; Southern Exposure and Steven Wolf Fine Art in San Francisco, CA; Gallery Lara in Tokyo, Japan; Galleria Karen Huber in Mexico City, Mexico; Lehmann Maupin in Aspen, CO; and OCHI in Los Angeles, CA and Sun Valley, ID. Granade’s work is held in various public and private collections including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Marciano Art Foundation, Hara Museum of Art, Glendale College, and the Mobile Museum of Art. Granade currently lives and works in Los Angeles, CA and is represented by OCHI in Los Angeles and Sun Valley, ID.