NYAB Event - Kenichi Hoshine "The Night Before"

Kenichi Hoshine "The Night Before"

Jonathan LeVine Gallery

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Jonathan LeVine Gallery presents The Night Before, a solo exhibition of new works by Kenichi Hoshine. For the artist’s first solo show, he has created a series of original mixed media paintings on wood panel.

In The Night Before, Hoshine’s pluralistic sensibility combines disparate influences. Elements of heightened realism appear sparsely, in sections, obscured through cloudy forms that echo the organic shapes and spontaneity of abstract expressionism. Working in layers of graphite, charcoal, paint, wax, and tea, Hoshine creates glimpses of fragmented figures in varying levels of focus. The resulting effect appears as partially concealed faces, hands, and other fractioned sections of the body, seemingly emerge from beyond—or withdraw into—a fog-like atmosphere.

The soft, intimate, and almost tactile quality to the human subjects depicted contrasts with the artist’s heavier textures and areas of rough line drawing. Hoshine’s figures, often female and often isolated, appear through an abstract haze of gestural brushwork, with their eyes closed or covered. Through their delicate vulnerability and distance in relation to the viewer, they are as intriguing in their (either) finely defined or nebulous forms, as that which is implied within the open, airy space surrounding them.

Hoshine’s enigmatic images are penetrating yet subjective in content, and his subtle aesthetic leaves much open for interpretation. The artist applies a painterly approach in creating his work, yet his compositions express a minimalist simplicity, blurring conventional lines of categorical description. Themes of solitude and contemplation exist, throughout. There is as much significance found in the seen as in the unseen, such as in a haiku poem or zen meditative mantra, when hearing the silence that follows the sound.