After a decade spent working in abstraction that mined the metaphysical and cosmological realms, the Los Angeles-based artist Theodore Boyer is reemerging with a new suite of narrative-based figurative paintings for Theodore Boyer: Mystic. Mother. Lover. his solo debut with Praz-Delavallade Los Angeles, opening November 10. At the start of 2020, Boyer returned to the figure with a series of paintings of his wife, Jamie, captured from memory in domestic settings or translated from photographs of her in natural environments spanning Mexico to Morocco. By merging the various dye techniques employed in his previous bodies of abstraction, Boyer renders a psychological (and psychedelic) underpainting—representing a meditative state of the unconscious mind—atop which images emerge. The figures are rendered in high chroma oil and casein which create tension and depth between the two materials. Sections of the paintings allow the viewer to peer into the mystical backgrounds acting as a portal into another dimension. __ Using ink as a conduit of time, Los Angeles-based artist Ellen Jong employs the ancient medium in a new series of wall works and sculpture that comprise her solo debut at Praz-Delavallade Los Angeles, Ellen Jong: Future Eve. Since the Neolithic period, ink has been used across cultures as a medium for transcription and a tool of expression. The ink from Jong’s childhood is utilized in traditional Chinese calligraphy and painting. It is dried then ground into liquid using water on a stone, and dates back to 12th Century BC. “I think of ink as a time machine that both inscribes itself throughout human history and, as an animal byproduct, has a lifespan all its own,” says Jong, who makes the ink she uses in her studio practice by sourcing animal gelatin from a book-binding supply shop and adding powder pigments to create colors that range from day-glo to absolute black. Reversing the traditional process of preparing dry ink for calligraphy, Jong begins with liquid ink, which she dehydrates in order to create a dried and malleable material for sculpture. Because the ink is organic, it is mortal, and thus transforms over time. __ In Robert Fontenot: Performance Documents (Part I), opening November 10 at Praz-Delavallade Projects, the LA-based artist paints a series of performances by the fictional Sylvia Hansen (born August 30th, 1946), a Los Angeles-based, feminist artist active throughout the 1970s whose work draws on technology and mysticism to explore themes such as marriage, trust and the role feminism plays in both the personal and public spheres. Over the past quarter century Robert Fontenot has been fascinated with fictional artists and the history of performance art. In the late Nineties he conceived the Victorian-era photographer Nikolai Vance. The artist made tin type photographs of marginalized individuals who would not have otherwise received sympathetic portraiture in the late 1800’s—from cross-dressing men to a three-legged child to a woman with wings— and created scientific dioramas relating to various physical and societal abnormalities not accepted during that time. A decade later Fontenot began an intense research project on the legacy of performance art, and recreated hundreds of iconic performances in a book—An Introduction to Performance Art—illustrated with sculpted bread dough.