ART: Zoe Walsh and Milo Matthieu at M+B Gallery

After a lovely summer lunch on the beautiful patio at Gracias Madre in West Hollywood, we stepped in to the M+B Gallery to see “When the breezes start”, an exhibit of Zoe Walsh. I was intrigued by a description of this non-binary Los Angeles artist as “interrogating notions of what it means to both look at and live in a queer body.”  Walsh starts with inspiration found in the ONE Institute gay and lesbian archives, looking at 1960s photos of amorous men in places like Griffith Park. Using layered silk-screening technique that superimposes silhouettes in negative or alternate color space, they have created large canvases with a collation of Los Angeles parkscapes and bodies, some obvious and some more concealed (which of course is a perfect analogy of what all goes on in Griffith Park), in muted dream-like color.

M+B has two spaces a couple of blocks apart, so we wandered over to the other space to see “A Note to Self”, the exhibit of Milo Matthieu, a New York artist whose Haitian roots inspired his latest works. These are more abstract than his earlier works, but evocative in color and form. Some of the shapes may suggest certain objects or ideas, not literally but more like a Rorschach test, in an intriguing way. You can only describe them the way we talk about wine, by analogies to flavors suggested but not really present. In The Rebirth with a few green shoots growing out of bold reds, it has “notes” of a boat, a bird, and a wedge of citrus. In The Exchange, I’m comforted by the cool aqua, and I might be in a kitchen with a teapot on stove looking out a window toward a neighbor’s window. But then the teapot might be a boat, and there’s a palm tree in the kitchen. Not sure what it means, but I enjoyed contemplating it.