With a focus on featuring artists who challenge the traditional approach to studio practice, Over the Influence presents Daisy Chain, a Hong Kong solo show debut by LA-based multidisciplinary artist Adam Beris. On view October 11 through November 9, 2019, the exhibition showcases a large body of work utilizing paint as sculpting material.
Over the past year, Beris has developed a particular language that creates imagery from individual shapes of objects, symbols or faces-in-profile, which he arranges on a flat canvas surface. Primarily applying paint straight from the tube, the artist resists the urge to render precise details of the desired image, bringing it closer in for analysis. Arranging the elements in a grid-like fashion, Beris constructs a scheme filled with characters and their surrounding elements, allowing the viewer to compose a dialogue among them. The impasto feel of the surface recalls traditional painterly approach, while the end result reminisces of the distilled hieroglyphic language of universally recognizable symbols.
Beris experiments with different backgrounds as well as different patterns or styles of arrangement. From strict formats filled with multi-colored faces, whose orientation might suggest social behavior, all the way to large assemblages filled with scattered items, the artist explores the symbology of elements and how they inter-relate. From food items over graphic ideograms, all the way to the artist's initials, each detail added to the clusters becomes a potential key to "reading" the image while feeding the human desire to recognize and categorize. The show also includes some abstract works where the artist further experiments with the utilization of paint as a sculpting material, often breaking away from figurative expression. –Sasha Bogojev
