DENNIS FOSTER // Wake Up New

On view June 24–September 3, 2023
Opening reception Saturday, June 24 (3–5pm)

Nationale welcomes Los Angeles-based painter Dennis Foster for his first solo exhibition with the gallery. Wake Up New debuts a series of flashe and acrylic paintings that feel particularly Californian, though perhaps subconsciously. Flashes of fire orange, cobalt blue, and verdant green offer bold recollections of shimmering pools, expansive rolling hills, and the bright freneticism of the southern California sun. Their arrangement in rhythmic and recurring geometric patterns stills their energy into a restrained feeling of light and introspection. Moving through the Project Room gallery, where the work is presented, is meant as a full sensory immersion, a simulation of what it feels to be present in a visual landscape that forever reinvigorates the soul. Here Foster recreates for his audience the sensation of driving along the coastal regions of Ventura and Northern Malibu outside of Los Angeles, where the southern edges of the Santa Monica Mountains graciously descend into the Pacific around each corner. If traveling in the evening time, in the right direction, one can follow the sun falling until it finally rests behind a calming curtain of blue.

In Wake Up New, Foster channels this meditative movement and exacts it onto the canvas inviting viewers into a simple yet expansive space. Color is borrowed and exchanged amidst the works and harmony maintained by displaying pieces such as Long Thought, Stored Energy, and Memory Sand sequentially, their uniform sizing mirroring the greater theme of incremental progression. The imagery of the natural landscape is depicted rather loosely and somewhat metaphorically in this most recent body of work, albeit with a palpable urgency of time and sequential repetition. Simplistic in their palette, these canvases demand mindful attention by way of their precise inspiration from the natural world, rendered in an almost mechanical fashion. Observed in whole, the suite of works creates a distinct visual language seeped in the poetics of time and the changing of the tides.

Dennis Foster lives and works in Los Angeles, CA. He has held several solo exhibitions with Ampersand Gallery in Portland, OR, as well as Legion Projects in Sonoma, CA. This is his first solo exhibition at Nationale.

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