I’ve been enjoying drawing happy and sad animals lately, like my friend Jacob the Happy Rabbit.  Late last year I visited the Cal Arts national portfolio review day, where admissions officers from colleges around the country come to review art work.  I brought along my Jacob the Happy Rabbit drawings to see what kind of critique I could get.  I also met the director of Culver City’s Billy Shire Fine Art’s.

Ryuichi Ogino better known as Ogi is in town from Tokyo for Blender, the debut group show at the newly transformed Cerasoli : LeBasse gallery. DailyduJour caught up with Ogi as he was working on his mixed-media installation featuring paintings, drawings on paper, an army of his hand-sculpted clay figures and more (expect a multimedia angle with a tv on the floor).

In addition to the installation, Ogi has four large pieces in the show.  This work is a reaction to Takashi Murakami’s  heavily infuential superflat movement.  Ogi explained that superflat is not just about flatness in terms of dimensionality — the removal of highs and lows, but is also about a removal of “context”.  His new work seeks to reaffirm the importance of context by employing ‘mash-up’ techniques to varying degrees.  In the extreme example, Ogi presents three stark contexts — a black panel, a figurative panel and then a colored square pattern panel.

Blender featuring the art of Ryuichi Ogino and several other artists opens this Saturday October 11th @ Cerasol : LeBasse in Culver City, CA.

Cerasoli : LeBasse
8530-B Washington Blvd.
Culver City, CA 90232

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