Wharton + Espinosa presents Eli Langer

Wharton + Espinosa presents Eli Langer

Eli Langer Wharton + Espinosa’s inaugural exhibit

Open Friday during art weekend LA.

Show Runs Through: September 19th – November 2nd, 2012

Let’s begin with the gravitational pull of the moon. It is the force that extracts the sap from trees and the light that has followed Eli his entire life. This lunar influence is the starting point for his immersive environments that generate relationships between all aspects of his creative output, an output that is simultaneously elemental and lurid. It is elemental because his usage of light is more than illumination. It is that, but it’s also part of an encompassing diagrammatic structure that traces energy jumping from one point to another.

The light emanating from his lamp structures land on the ridges of the deep, deliberate grooves of his waxy, black paintings. This recording of an elusive circulation of energy encapsulates the viewer, utilizing perception and reflection to bring awareness of their inclusion in this energy flow. Viewers appear and disappear in their own distorted reflections, fading in and out from colored haze into total darkness.

Yet the purity of this elemental motion and self-awareness is somehow rendered impure by Langer’s irreverent sensibility. His darkened environments — illuminated with constellations of colored light and chromatic reflective surfaces — use asymmetry and physical matter-of-factness to make them more akin to the nocturnal spaces inhabited by the sharp jagged shadows in Fritz Lang’s “M” or a gritty locale imagined by Raymond Chandler. Langer orients and disorients.

Simultaneously primordial and calculated, his zealous sensibility of line is a sullied and beautiful eroticism that mines the back alleys, dark spaces, and traffic-laden roadways of the Los Angeles Eli Langer calls home. States Langer, “There is no attempt to hide the monster, it’s important to acknowledge that the monster is me.”

Wharton + Espinosa
Pacific Design Center 8687 Melrose Avenue #B275, West Hollywood, CA 90069
(310) 903-9566
Monday to Friday (11 – 6) and by appointment
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