Zhou B Art Center presents a concurrent exhibition featuring works by Duk Ju L. Kim, Darrell Roberts, and John Salhus.

The most immediately apparent common dialogue in their work is communicated through the use of distinct and prominent brushstrokes. Each artist creates compositions of accumulation in which a proliferation of marks are at once graphic and illusory. A sense of spontaneity and presence of the artist's hand recently in contact with the canvas emanates in the beat and scratch of their varied mark making.

Exuberance for color is another common denominator in their work. Admittedly seduced by the cult color, to different ends they three alternately use color as structure and color as pure chroma - on its own slippery terms. The contrasts in their imagery all the more serve to illuminate and expand the content in the work as well as each artist's methods and materials involvement.

Each individual artist is deeply engaged with the physicality of paint. Duk Ju's marks often operate as dense scaffolding that flesh out architectural spaces and forms that can be at times both interior and exterior. With saturated colors, John creates images with persisting or exaggerated colors masking a disconcerting artificiality. Entrancing layer upon layer of viscous and grainy pigments distinguish the surface of Darrell's canvases, which present an emotive record of steady contemplation.

Considerable impetus and sustenance for a lively studio practice comes to each of the artists through an alert engagement with their surroundings, including the communion with one another.

Image: © Darrell Roberts, Zhou B Art Center