Pacific Rim Job

Richard Hawkins

Alex Hubbard

Jon Pestoni

Martel Window Project: Roni Shneior

Richard Telles presents a three-person exhibition entitled Pacific Rim Job, featuring new paintings by Richard Hawkins, Alex Hubbard and Jon Pestoni. Conceived from an ongoing dialogue and friendship between these artists, this exhibition reveals their overlapping interest in and critique of the painterly gesture.

Richard Hawkins’ new collage-paintings comprise cut and pasted images borne from his ongoing research into celebrity, Greco-Roman statuary, Japanese pop culture, and art history framed by riotous color and brushwork–each piece acting as a possible index to his oeuvre. Pestoni’s paintings on paper are immersed in layers of painterly process, often overlaid by a singular and unbroken ‘expressive’ gesture or coup de gras, which at once concretizes and obscures the processes underneath. Alex Hubbard continues his interest in the performative aspect of painting, resulting in chromatically rich, glossy surfaces that feel spontaneously alive. The social camaraderie that connects each artist partly results from a shared ethos, in which painterliness is a site of catharsis and sign.

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For the Martel Window Project, a space viewable from the sidewalk on Martel Avenue twenty-four hours a day, Roni Shneior presents a hanging and rotating mobile sculpture entitled Orbit.

Partly derived from her memories from the coast of her native Israel, where all means of conveyance drifted by in the distance, Shneior’s mobile sculpture features an airplane, submarine, ship, and satellite, each sheathed in tiled-mirror. Shneior’s deliberately naive construction with common household materials forces each object to veer precariously from ‘realism’, analogous to how their meanings can shift according to each viewer. In apprehending each of Shneior’s renditions, they become springboards to an imagined ‘adventure’ or reverie, much like how childhood mobiles over a crib serve the same function. The additional feature of their sparkle, like a disco ball, renders the vehicles of warfare and commerce vaguely benign, yet magically realistic.

Roni Shneior recently was featured in a two-person exhibition at Parker Gallery, Los Angeles in 2018. She also held a solo exhibition at Joan, Los Angeles in 2017. She lives and works in Los Angeles.