“Friends of Mine“
The Fourth Wall Gallery
473 25th St.
Oakland
Through July 13
Pablo Picasso once remarked, “It took me four years to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to paint like a child.” The Fourth Wall Gallery director Susan Aulik said as much while talking about her fellow artists in the gallery’s current show, Friends of Mine, which features work by Dorian Reid, Latefa Noorzai, and Aulik herself. “There’s no self-censorship in their work,” Aulik said.
It is indeed a show generously unbound by the editorial doubtfulness that curtails many artists’ creative processes. The works on exhibit complement one another in their unfettered whimsy, texturally rich compositions, use of unusual color combinations, and playful quasi-figurative forms.
Aulik, who grew up in Stockton, told me that she left the Sacramento – San Joaquin river delta city “as soon as I could drive” founding The Fourth Wall Gallery in 2016. The current show is one of only two group exhibitions at the space that have featured Aulik’s pieces. “I never wanted to do a solo show of my own work here,” she said.
For Friends of Mine, Aulik approached Creative Growth and NIAD (Nurturing Independence through Artistic Development) — where Reid and Noorzai make art — because she liked their free expression. The resulting combination is loose and playful; the works bouncing off each other in a way that keeps one’s gaze moving. When I asked about a conspicuous blank space on one of the gallery’s walls, Aulik said, “That’s to let the eye rest.” A good curatorial choice as there’s a lot to occupy the ocular.
The walls of the gallery feature Aulik’s collages while Reid’s ceramic work rest on pedestals that dot the open space. Noorzai’s large pen and acrylic pieces — 44 by 30 inches — are displayed in a hallway just outside the gallery proper. Noorzai’s paintings are bright, straightforward and spontaneous, possessing a bold and deeply sophisticated sense of color. Born in Kabul, Afghanistan, Noorzai is a native Farsi speaker who has practiced art making at Creative Growth since 2019. And her work has been nominated for the Art Absolument Award (Outsider Art Fair, Paris, 2019).
Aulik’s pieces are works on paper. During the height of the COVID pandemic, she said creatures began showing up in her abstract paintings. (“Weirdos,” as she calls them.) She took to cutting up some of her older paintings — created with oil, acrylic, spray paint, graphite, and other mediums — and assembled the parts as collages. Many of those collages and their reimagined “weirdos” are striking, particularly ones like “Crazy Al,” “Orson, Sr.,” and the one that captured me most, “Buster” (on view in top photo). He is a blocky abstract head centered in the middle of its framed space in gradated blacks, grays, and subtle touches of blue.
But my absolute favorites were the glazed ceramic pieces by Dorian Reid. A native of the Bay Area, Reid attends the NIAD studio regularly. Her three-dimensional pieces serve as a perfect foil for Aulik’s collages. They’re fantastic on multiple levels. The beings she brings to life include a toothy orca-like whale (“Willy the Whale,” in top photo), a splay-footed ochre-colored beaverish figure, (“Sonny”), and, best of all, “Lucky the Dragon” which has a removable head and can contain incense so that its nostrils smoke. Beauty and utility!
Friends of Mine is an excellent and well curated show. It steers the eye in ways that, as Aulik states, are “subversive and clever,” liberated from critical constraints and into the wonder of what art making can do. It dazzles by unearthing what the child in each of us can identify with: play.
