Jacob Hashimoto. Installation view of Paper Paradise at Ronchini Gallery, London. Courtesy of Michele Roberto Sereni and Ronchini Gallery.

American-born Jacob Hashimoto’s eye-catching exhibition, The Other Sun, at London’s Ronchini Gallery in Mayfair certainly brings to mind planetary brilliance in color and splendor. Hashimoto uses traditional kite-making materials and techniques to create singular, modular units collectively arranged into numinous, monumental installations and smaller, woven, three-dimensional wall pieces. Hanging by threads, the thousands of multicolored translucent kites are hand-made with rice paper and bamboo, each tiny kite delightfully constructed with exacting care. Elegant white, solid gold, or patterned, the cascading assemblage of kites moves like a flowing river of shimmering color, rolling through the space with extraordinary buoyancy and energy. It’s difficult for the eye to focus on an individual kite without getting lost in the whole, all-encompassing space. Some of the more decorated kites are like tiny paintings; each “superflat” composition floats above or below its surrounding neighbour, intrinsically incorporated into the design like the patterned scales of a fish.

At the entrance to the gallery, Hashimoto’s large-scale installation flows into motion with a subtle, meditative rhythm as I open the glass door and pass underneath. It conveys a sense of wonder and playfulness as the texture, lighting, and angle of the work shifts and changes while traveling through the speckled environment. While meandering beneath, the bright, fluttering work reveals itself to be an illuminated, celestial landscape borrowed from traditional Japanese painting or Manga animation—each viewer becoming a figure suspended in a handcrafted paper paradise. The temptation to reach out and touch is too much for most, and many forfeit at least to blow a small breath of wind, causing a delightful tremble to ribbon through the work.

Ronchini Gallery exterior. Photo Courtesy of Michele Roberto Sereni and Ronchini Gallery.

The artist’s smaller works, hanging like wall paintings near the back of the space, are more like high-relief installations with tea saucer-sized kites strung to each other, interwoven tightly and tied to wooden rods driven into the walls. Each kite stands at attention from the taught, pulled strings, and vibrates and dances with any change in the wind (or the fanciful breath of the playful admirers). Many seem like cartoonish landscapes, each kite a bulb of a swirling cloud or wave traveling along the surface of a sapphire-blue ocean. Among the organic and ovular shapes, another more subtle work stands out in its geometric, dynamic lines, like an ice-colored, slender vertical waterfall of translucent paper bow ties, sprinkled with a smattering of colored confetti.

On the Nature of Heroes, 2012; 122 x 122 x 20 cm; bamboo, paper, dacron, acrylic. Photo courtesy of Ronchini Gallery.

Incorporating craft, design, sculpture, installation, and painterly abstraction, Hashimoto’s collective fluttering installations are buoyant, ethereal, and celebratory—somehow traditional and modern at the same time. It is refreshing to say the least to attend an exhibition whose primary concern is with experiencing beauty. Hashimoto’s installation seemingly pours out into the street through the gallery’s windows to delight passersby and brighten the gray summer days of London.

Jeff Sonhouse. Installation view (from left to right): "Papi Shampoo," Mixed media and oil on fiberboard; "Mateo Manhood aka Buzz Kill," Oil on fiberboard; "Decompositioning," Mixed media and oil on fiberboard; 2010. Courtesy Martha Otero.

Leslie Hewitt’s Grounded is a staircase that goes nowhere. I saw it at the California African American Museum last winter in After 1968: Contemporary Artists and the Civil Rights Legacy, a show about the ripples of the year a jailed Huey P. Newton said “we’re hoping the master dies” and Joan Didion experienced socio-politically induced “nausea and vertigo.” All artists included were born in the last 42 years, after 1968.

Because I walked between the wall label and Hewitt’s sculpture twice, the gallery attendant asked if I understood the art. Caught off guard, I asked, “Do you?”

She said she did, then told me what was more or less a parable: back in the ‘60s, my father and hers might have worked for the same company, lived in company houses, and been offered tools to refine these houses. To get their tools, they might’ve stood in lines, my father in the “whites only” line, hers in the line for black employees. Mine might have gotten one set of tools, hers another. Her father’s wouldn’t have fit together correctly and he might have complained to the bosses, but they would have shrugged, and said, “Those black people never get it right.” Then he would have done what he could, building the pyramid-like, non-functional staircase with its angled railing.

Though weirdly precise, this story sidesteps one key fact: Hewitt’s Grounded is the work of someone who wields the “wrong” tools like a pro. It turns non-functionality into a cool exercise in stylish lyricism, a way to control the way you’re being controlled and an f*** you to the powers that be.

Jeff Sonhouse, "Mateo Manhood aka Buzz Kill," Oil on fiberboard, 16 x 13 ¼ inches, 2010. Courtesy Martha Otero.

Jeff Sonhouse’s paintings are stylishly controlled, too. On view at Martha Otero Gallery, the cameos of masked men indulge in pattern and texture. The subject of Gravity’s Lawlessness, for instance, wears a lemon and ultramarine diamond print suit, with neck and face masked to match. In Maskulinity Resuscitated, the subject has steel wool curls, and wears pinstripes and oversized cream-colored medallions that fall past the painting’s edge. All the other figures stay within their designated rectangles, however. They’re posed head-on like Van Eyck’s and their dandyism feels like it’s festering on the panel surfaces.

This is Sonhouse’s first solo exhibition in Los Angeles, surprising since his debut at New York’s Jack Tilton Gallery took place eight years ago, but also fitting. His work has a New York ethos. His men could live in Brownstones and feel at home wandering through the frames of Looking for Langston (if the film were in full color, that is). The show’s title, “Better off Dead,” said the Landlord, has a New York feel to it as well. It’s hierarchical and violent but also vague.

Jeff Sonhouse, "Our Savior," Oil, gouache, watercolor, matches on paper, 22 ½ x 14 inches, 2010. Courtesy Martha Otero.

The eyes of the figures, peeking out of their various masks (or anti-peeking, in the case of Papi Shampoo, who has mirrors in his sockets) are opaque in a way that feels like refusal, maybe a refusal to acknowledge to the amorphous “Landlord” but more likely a refusal to acknowledge vulnerability of any sort.

There’s a Jesus motif in the show,  but it’s not Papi Shampoo with his purple cloak and Nazarene-worthy hair or the protagonist of Decomposition with his large, shepherding hands that play the role of the deliverer. In Our Savior, a small work on paper, a slight man stares out of a rough-cut geometric mask with eyes that are warmer than those of the other figures. The matches that make up his hair leave a halo of soot around his head. He’s turned the “tools” of convention–suits, squares, matches–into vehicles for passive aggression and seems to be toying with letting go of his “stylish control.”  Maybe he’ll self-combust, or lurch forward off the picture plane. If he does, the tension that holds Sonhouse’s show together would collapse, and it’s hard to predict what would happen next.

Los Angeles based artist Chris Beas is currently presenting a new exhibition titled Tamburello at Martha Otero Gallery in L.A. Similar to previous exhibitions by the Beas, Tamburello consists of several flat works which are bridged by a larger freestanding sculptural installation in the center of the gallery. The exhibition focuses acutely on the events of May 1st 1994 when Formula One driver Ayrton Senna crashed his vehicle and died taking a sharp turn during the San Marino Grand Prix. Driving at nearly 200 miles per hour at the time of the crash, the Tamburello corner marked the last site of the driver’s spectacular career.

For the exhibition, Beas has created ten new paintings that feature die cast metal replicas of race cars driven during Senna’s first ten years of F1 driving. The paintings simulate the affect of driving a vehicle at such high speeds. In the center of the gallery, a 1/32 scale model replica of the F1 circuit rack at Imola serves as the site of the San Marino Slot Car Grand Prix for which the driver had his last race.

Chris Beas was born in Sierra Modre, California and received his MFA from the University of California, San Diego. The artist has previously exhibited at the Prague Biennale 3, Parc Saint Leger Centre D’Art Contemporain in Pougues-les-Eaux, France, and Casey Kaplan, New York, NY.