REMAIN IN LIGHT, opening at Nicodim Gallery in Los Angeles, is an ouroboros of the day-night continuum, a study of flesh-in-light as it reflects, refracts, and reframes the sun and elements in the daytime, the city’s ambient and aggressive streetlights and neons in the night, and the ecstatic, throbbing strobe on indoor creatures and cretins ambivalent to whether the day is breaking or falling.
Each of the three featured artists occupies his own fraction of the cycle: Laurent Proux’s human figures are beasts of the daylight. They engage in polyamorous union with the ground, the flora, and the sun in orgies of limbs, light, and landscape. Proux’s sun both blinds and illuminates the erotically charged ongoings, while the other subjects radiate their own energies outward in playful opposition.
Robert Yarber’s city nightscapes parlay both the absence of natural illumination and the way certain characters come to higher or lower consciousness under neons and fluorescents. The physics behind his falling or flying figures are built upon morals and ethos of subterranean origin, but it takes a certain flavor of glow to bring them out. Yarber’s depictions of night life are defined by the way light of artificial origin dominates certain figures into precarious situations.
Finally, Tomas Harker’s visions of 1990s rave culture exist almost outside of time and memory itself, though decidedly in places the sun can’t reach. His renderings have a granulated quality, as if the viewer is watching on a VHS tape, but the pulse of the strobe cast back from bodies in the peaky throes of music and chemicals is unmistakable. The revelations felt on Harker’s Saturday night will be repented Sunday morning.
