There are, indeed, things that cannot be put into words. They make themselves manifest. They are what is mystical. -Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1922)

Ochi Gallery is pleased to present Dream Bird Beyond Sound, Beyond Time, a solo exhibition featuring works by Los Angeles based artist Rives Granade.

This body of work continues Granade’s exploration into the mutability of forms with color being a dominating interest.  Radiating energy from the canvas, Granade achieves his saturated hues by using acrylic gouache as a primary medium.  Shifting away from the artist’s usual oil paint, the gouache allows for a more immediate kind of mark making; the colors being matte and intense, leaving a surface almost fragile in its sheen.

This work marks a departure in Granade's use of computer based or found imagery. While all of the paintings contain snippets of recognizable forms, they are for the most part done in an automatic way. Employing the basic formula for ab ex painting whereby one makes a mark and then responds to it, Granade’s gestures might be more of a shape or a drawing than a mere brushstroke, but they do acknowledge a consistent desire to combine hard edged abstraction with gestural existentialism. In many ways they look back to the first modern abstract paintings and the short-lived movement of Orphism.

Though generally abstract, as these works developed, Granade noticed that birds or bird-like forms kept emerging. The birds are not always recognizable as birds, and some in fact aren't birds at certain points. Ever exploring the edge between abstraction and figuration, they hover, as all of this work is meant to, in an in-between space where meaning is not fixed and can be configured in many ways.

Rives Granade earned a BA in philosophy from Washington and Lee University, Lexington, VA (2002), and an MFA from The San Francisco Art Institute (2008). The artist has recently shown work at Ochi Projects, Los Angeles, M+B Gallery, Los Angeles, Harmony Murphy Gallery, Los Angeles, Gallery Lara, Tokyo, Japan, The Underground Museum, Los Angeles, and Marine Projects, Venice, CA.