Mario Ayala Rubber Biscuit Arresting for their architectural supports, technicality, and refined surfaces, Mario Ayala’s paintings allude to abundant cultural histories not only in subject matter, but through technical and material investigation. Embracing music as an influential part of his process, the title of Ayala’s exhibition is borrowed from a 1956 doo-wop song. While The Chips’ “Rubber Biscuit” exemplifies an up-tempo, light-hearted, nonsensical classic, it's also, paradoxically, about hunger and scarcity. The song's mostly unintelligible lyrics performed in a dadaist poetry-scat manner, evoke the use of humor and satire to address social struggles, using imagination and expression as the last available tools of agency. With these themes in mind, and following Ayala's concept of the exhibition as a kind of remix, Rubber Biscuit offers a capacious view of absurdities and questions associated with ritual and design, trade and tradition, and the ideas that permeate the artist’s work and illustrates a commitment to mining the intersection of the widely-shared and intimately autobiographical. Ayala is included in several group museum exhibitions on view across California, including Sitting on Chrome: Mario Ayala, rafa esparza, and Guadalupe Rosales, on view through February 19, 2024 at SFMOMA, and Xican–a.o.x. Body, on view through January 7, 2024 at The Cheech Marin Center for Chicano Art & Culture of the Riverside Art Museum, California. ____ Odili Donald Odita Degrees of Separation Degrees of Separation, Odili Donald Odita's first solo exhibition with our gallery, features a group of new paintings in which the artist poses pointed questions about the meaning and perception of darkness in a variety of social and aesthetic contexts. In so doing, he elaborates and expands upon themes that have characterized his work for more than twenty years, exploring ways in which color, line, geometry, implied movement, and patterning inform shared experiences of the world at large. The works in this exhibition demonstrate, in an invigorating variety of permutations, how darkness is in fact a mode of generative seeing and feeling that includes such states as contemplation, rest, and, perhaps contrary to prevailing expectations, profound luminosity. ____ Joel Mesler zrikha sheqi'att hashemesh (Sunrise Sunset) Joel Mesler has become known in recent years for paintings that bring together autobiographical reflection, self-effacing humor, an open-hearted sense of precision and design, and a sly conceptualism with roots in a heterogenous group of modernist and postmodernist approaches to artmaking. zrikha sheqi'att hashemesh (Sunrise Sunset) finds him expanding his work in each of these categories and revealing the deeper strains of cultural awareness and collective purpose that have motivated him since the beginning of his multifaceted career. The exhibition features two groups of paintings: nine small-format portraits of rabbis and thirteen large-scale canvases dedicated to the text-based imagery and rich visual patterning that have defined much of his project over the last decade. While these groups can be seen as discrete series, each with its own formal and material parameters and associated themes and variations, in the context of the show as a whole, they form an intricately interwoven story of celebration and loss told on both personal and transpersonal scales. ____ Image: Mario Ayala, Emilia's Tortas, 2023, acrylic on canvas, 47 3/4 x 69 inches (121.3 x 175.3 cm). Photo: Grant Gutierrez