Join us this Saturday for an artist walk-through with Keywan Tafteh. The artist will be present throughout the day, offering personal tours of his work. Refreshments will be served. …. Currently On View: No Plateaus Daniela Soberman and Keywan Tafteh …. Between Soberman’s rejection of the cylinder and Tafteh’s revisioning of the (hetero-)normativity of straightforward or squared frames for surfaces, both artists work directly with form and structure as rememberings, residues, and resonances of social, political, historical, and geographical forces acting on bodies and conditioning psychic realities. For Soberman, a lucid recovery of such residues requires passing through the gauzy, oozing, dripping membranes that ice her structures with memory’s sugary glaze. For Tafteh, delirium, not the estranged lucidity of a dream, appears to be both the treatment and the cure carried out in task of dissolving residues of normalizing structures. More, it is the undulating anonymity of a body beside itself—a body that is nobody (in particular)—not even some body, but only a body. A body marked only by the drifting limits of its flesh, and not by a name or an identity. His figures reach as they retract, fold as they stretch, their sinews articulating a sense of both deep and shallow time. Sexual space-time (as a kind of near distance): never closer, and never farther away. Impending doom. Or, upending ecstasy. Positioned at the deepest point away from the gallery’s threshold, but also the most immediately visible upon entry, "Group Effort" (2022) and "Come As Catharsis" (2021) distort the entire space through their near distance—their sexual space-time. Navigating shallows as depths, and depths as pools, the works press and splay the delirious—but cathartic—tides of sexual time as embodied entries into questions of relation, community, love, otherness, and desire: the recipe for world (and its reconstruction). Sometimes masculine, sometimes feminine, sometimes neither (or both), the figures skin themselves alive in front of whoever bears witness and inscribe their contours with their warbling, rhythmically opening and closing. With the surfaces (almost always) completely filled-up with the gesturally formed figures, a voyeur is positioned so near to the naked forms that it becomes impossible to find the horizon of who the body might be. The most minimal of Tafteh’s paintings, "Knight" (2023), emerges precisely at this blinding horizon: the entire painting flowing from a single, initial gestural white line. No one in sight, yet somebody is there. Approaching the horizon but never getting nearer. As close as can be, but never farther away.... Remember: as Valéry records, skin is the greatest depth (L’Idée fixe (1932)). (Digital catalogue available on website) .... Keywan Tafteh is a Russian/Iranian/American artist based in Los Angeles. Having completed his studio arts education at UC San Diego in 2021, his interdisciplinary work has been shown through public commissions, solo shows, and group shows in Southern California. He has also participated in international artist residencies in Berlin and France. His recent solo exhibitions include "Glass Eye (Nazar)” at Adams Hill Park, Funded by the Glendale Arts & Culture Commission (2022), and “Walled Windows” at Community Contemporary in Los Angeles (2022). Daniela Soberman is a first-generation Serbian American self-taught artist living and working in Los Angeles. With her current body of work only recently emerging, Soberman has been the subject of solo exhibitions at both museums and galleries throughout Southern California since 2021, including: Gallery SADE (2022/3), J. Paul Getty Museum/Long Beach Museum of Art (2022), and the Torrance Art Museum (2022). Her work has also been featured in various two-person and group exhibitions.