Wade into texture, nature

John Koga, Hadley Nunes, Lawrence Seward and Tiffany Torre have a small, intimate show running upstairs at Cedar Street Galleries. It’s not a blockbuster, or a seasonal spasm of art presentation, or the kind of loosely organized assembly found on the walls of local eating establishments and lifestyle boutiques.

At the same time, it doesn’t feel like these four artists were thrown together in that “let’s do a group show” style that sometimes indicates too little work for a solo exhibition or emerges from the eternal slow churn of Hawaii’s space-restricted scene. With two sculptors in Koga and Seward, Nunes’ work in thick expressive brushstrokes, and Torre literally operating somewhere between them, “Fall” is more of a quiet but sustained conversation — almost like a jazz quartet where each player gets a chance to solo while ultimately contributing to the development of an overall theme.

The floor space of the gallery is occupied by three of Koga’s classic amorphous figures: the ghost-succulent-marshmallow forms that always seem to be poised between a state of growth, melting and dissolution.

They could be scaled-up microorganisms, polyps or invasive limu, the fingerprints of the giants that formed them left in their white surfaces.

Seward’s equally life-evoking sculptures are made from frayed strips of blown-out tires. You’ve seen these poor creatures on the side of the road, sometimes at the end of long undulating strokes of black skid marks. Seward has given them new life by painting their inside surfaces with multicolored lines that radiate, stretch and cut into each other. The highly rhythmic patterns recall Caribbean carnival costumes and New Guinean decorative aesthetics.

A close look inside “Broken Infinity” (the least decorated among them) reveals a small cut-out photograph of a colorfully dressed circus clown who is “wearing” an identical image of himself set in a smaller metal ring. As ambiguous — and quite possibly meaningless — as this image may be, I can’t help but think Seward is laughing at me. Who’s the clown? This sly, dry, oblique humor is typical of Seward; the “ethnographic” bait he leaves almost mocks the admirer of these modern primitive ready-mades.

Torre works with strips of material as well: hand-dyed wool that she bundles, twists, braids, knots, stacks and folds in order to build up textures and “soft sculptural” forms that one can feel with one’s eyes.

By applying oil paint to the fabric, she gains another layer of texture that, when taken together, pits reactions to what is clearly unnatural against a sensation of something profoundly organic.

In her artist statement she mentions the pursuit of a feeling of a “second skin,” the kind of intimate practicality found in blankets, sweaters and gloves. And yet upon closer inspection we find another surprising reversal: All of these works are named after water-based themes: “Surge,” “Downpour,” “Riptide” (a fascinating cascade of white loops viewed head-on and stacked sideways) and “Wave,” a fantastic domino of color-graded fabric squares sliding sideways like books on a shelf.

Nunes picks up on this exploration of textures and form with her paintings that zoom in on close frames of the natural world (“Tree 2”) and evoke the kind of light that one sees while squinting through one’s eyelashes or that flashes on the surface of churning water (“Light Source”). She makes powerful arrangements that are organized by rough but also fiery brushstrokes. Though these works lean toward the abstract, one never loses sight of what she is deconstructing into expressions of energy.

Taken together, “Fall” is a small-scale journey that covers a spectrum of textures and evocations of nature. Start your observation at any one artist’s work, and as your attention shifts to the next, a sense of giving and taking is unavoidable. Koga’s subtly textured, hand-worked biomorphic surfaces give way to the inside-outside duel of Seward’s reproductions, paved on the inside with an almost childlike glee.

The twists of Seward’s forms are picked up by Torre, who goes deep into the myriad ways that repetition and scale produce a rich diversity. At this expression of the natural where waves break and tumble vertically, Nunes finishes the phrasing with her energetic renderings of bark, stone, cloud and distance.

It’s quite a trip to take in such a small, almost understated space.