Nancy Toomey Fine Art is pleased to announce an exhibition of works by Casper Brindle and Alex Weinstein titled Transcendent Matter on view from July 7 to August 26, 2023. The gallery is located inside San Francisco's Minnesota Street Project, 1275 Minnesota Street. Gallery hours are Thursdays, Fridays, Saturdays, 12pm to 4pm, and by appointment--please contact nancy@nancytoomeyfineart.com or 415-307-9038.

Transcendent Matter brings together Los Angeles-based artists Casper Brindle and Alex Weinstein. The two, life-long surfers and close friends, present a shared reverence for the sublimity of landscape with their seductive output. The exhibition features new, wall-based sculptural work made of mass-cast resin and vacuum-formed plexiglass. Both artists’ use of non-conventional materials highlight a shared interest in expanding the vocabulary of art process while riffing on well-established movements of the recent past. Each artist’s work has an ebullience of its own but their processes are quite different. Brindle’s acclaimed Light Glyph series employs industrial production techniques and his immaculate sculptures flirt with reductive austerity while joyously juxtaposing effusive color. By comparison, Weinstein’s Ocean State sculptures are decidedly tactile, sensual objects created start-to-finish by hand. Exploring the heft, hue and rhythm of the sea, these quieter works have a personality bordering on portraiture. The show’s focus on materiality commingles references to Minimalism, Light and Space and Finish Fetish art production of the 1970’s LA scene while expressing a renewed enthusiasm for subject, bordering on romantic, which in turn gifts the exhibition with a vibrant contemporary pulse.

Transformative and mysterious, Casper Brindle’s newest series, the Light Glyphs, continues his investigation into the expressive possibilities of color and form while utilizing new materials and modes of production. A most ancient form of communication, a glyph is a symbol or mark carved in relief to convey ideas without words. These enigmatic pieces tend more toward sculptural object than painting, each a single sheet of shimmering metallic color encased in a transparent shell, punctuated only by a radiant central form. A glowing push and pull ensues as the viewer circles the piece, the object before them shifting before their eyes. The slim bar of neon color that cuts through the picture plane invites a quiet reverence, as form seems to materialize from the abyss, in an act of technicolor alchemy. The rigidity of the hard-edge shapes and boundaries of the picture plane is softened by the use of un-expected and sensuous color. The tension in these works presents the viewer with a series of intriguing dualities; they seem to float in the space between reality and illusion, the finite and the infinite. The repetition of form and brilliant swathes of color create a visual language that becomes a meditation on experience and perception.

Alex Weinstein writes about his Ocean State sculptures, "I come from Rhode Island, the Ocean State, and titled this series for my old home. Of course the title works as adouble entendre for an emotional and/or physical state too and that association is vital to the project. The work itself is made from surfboard manufacturing materials: resin and fiberglass and is part of a larger body of work I started in 2003 called swell models. Using those materials has always felt authentic to me (a lifelong surfer) and a continuing chat with the LA artist forbears I have come to know so well. I use oil paint to tint my sculptural work and everything is made by hand. The shapes are based on feel and experience, not 3D scanners and C&C machines. The color comes from the landscape via my paint tray. To me, the magic of the Western skyline, dusted with jet fuel and the surging Pacific below it, present a type of chemical optimism. That pulse is the heartbeat of my work."

Nancy Toomey Fine Art