Night Gallery is proud to present The Violet Hour, an exhibition of new paintings by the Los Angeles-based artist Ben Tong. This is Tong’s solo debut with the gallery and follows his participation in the 2022 group show Shrubs. At the end of her 1989 novel Sexing the Cherry, Jeanette Winterson writes: “…even the most solid of things and the most real, the best-loved and the well-known, are only hand shadows on the wall. Empty space and points of light.” What is most familiar to us proves elusive in form, subject to change with the sun, only to later reappear as itself. California light plays this dimensional trick especially well. It is ancient and ephemeral, absorbing into the sides of mountains and low-lying shrublands, piercing concrete driveways, gliding along Pacific saltwater. Sunlight immerses us in recollection and pure presence. Profoundly influenced by the Californian atmosphere, Ben Tong’s enigmatic paintings radiate from within and between such expanses of “empty space and points of light.” The title The Violet Hour alludes to the dreamlike threshold just before nightfall, when the outside world is bathed in the deepest entanglement of light and shadow. The air murmurs with tension and stillness as it gives way to something that glows. In his newest body of work, Tong excavates the painted field as one would their own memory, establishing a luminous tone through gesture and material interaction. The dynamic nature of Tong’s process resonates with the evocative impact of the final paintings. His canvases are open and unburdened yet conscious, charged with thought. Tong often utilizes unconventional tools—ranging from rags to a massage gun—to continuously impress oil paint upon the canvas. The inherent unpredictability of this approach allows the artist to remain open to what may emerge, to be a transmitter for chaos and unactivated imagery. Shapes surface from the repeated acts of painting and wiping away, washed in vivid hues of purple, blue, orange, and pink. Little rainbows revisit various scenes, refracting wavelengths from an unknown origin. Action begets meaning, rather than the other way around. Flowers, glass vessels, the hazy suggestion of a chandelier. Glimmers of traditional still life anchor Tong’s paintings in loose clarity, creating a viewing experience that negotiates the phenomenological and the representational. The works’ mesmerizing quality derives from Tong’s uncanny ability to refine forms down to their essence as embodiments of light, exalted and murky. This is an offering of natural and artistic generosity—the light is provisional, but it always comes back. —Jayne Pugh ____ Night Gallery is pleased to present Greensleeves, an exhibition of new paintings by David Korty. In the works throughout Greensleeves, the ceramic vessels that held bouquets of flowers in previous paintings have disappeared. Instead, this new flora appears at eye level, jutting across light blue backgrounds, creating a tangled green matrix. Although confined to Korty’s sharply defined squares and rectangles, each image within seems to glow under the pressure of its own hermetic environment. Amid the disc-like flowers and their accompanying, arrow-straight stems, other cut paper forms emerge that allude to Korty’s long standing motifs—printed letters, circular voids that resemble hole punches or eyes—and include a new one, the artist’s own handprint. The exhibition title derives from a character’s name in the animated film Twice Upon a Time, directed by the artist’s father John Korty in the early ‘80s. As a teenager, David Korty lived on and off with his father in the three-story building in Mill Valley (Marin County, CA) that served as both a studio for the making of Twice Upon A Time and a makeshift home. Animators set up complex camera stands in the various bedrooms for the cut paper layouts and experimented with Korty’s own brand of what he called “Lumage” (cut and dyed Pellon paper lit from behind on glass panes). The studio became famous for its rogue techniques, one of which involved a 500 gallon aquarium that housed a photographic diorama of frozen city folk to be flooded with black ink for “The Nightmare Scene.” The movie’s unique, cut paper imagery and imaginative use of zany humor eventually made it a cult classic. On the weekends, Korty wandered his father’s studio, borrowing the animators’ X-acto knives, templates, dyed paper, and hole punches. He also reportedly stole a few of their audio tapes, including David Bowie’s 1977 album Low. Towards the end of his father’s recent illness, Korty shuttled back and forth from Los Angeles to his father’s northern California home, keeping his hands busy by traveling with a large cardboard box full of drawing materials and working on paper at night. It was during these late nights that Korty began to meditate on the profound impression his father’s work had made on his own. Korty returned home to his Los Angeles studio, and to his signature cut-paper process. To make the works in Greensleeves, the artist first adheres Hahnemühle paper to his canvases, creating a smooth, taut surface. He then applies Flashe paint, colored pencil, and collage with monoprints and hand cut-paper shapes. Korty builds his paintings layer by layer, often painting over or pasting out graphic passages which are later re-pasted with alternate images. Hard edges and bold geometries find their counterparts in the intimacy of his handprints and colored pencil marks. Throughout Greensleeves, Korty preserves decades of impulses and recollections while continuing to push forward. Painting itself is an imperfect vessel, burdened by two-dimensional constraints and art history’s baggage. It’s also an ideal place to think about legacy and inheritance: adding and subtracting while waiting for the gift of sound and vision. Image: David Korty, Judy’s Comet, 2023, flashe, prismacolor pencil and hahnemuhle paper on canvas, 52 x 72 in (132.1 x 182.9 cm)