December 11th, 2015 – January 10th, 2016

“Mother of Nature”

A solo show featuring new sculptures and paintings drawings and collages by  Jonathan Ryan Storm

Cardoza Fine Art 1320 Nance 77002

December 11th – January 10th

Opening December 11th, 7pm – 10pm

Cardoza Fine Art is pleased to present Mother of Nature, a solo exhibition of Houston-based artist Jonathan Ryan Storm. Storm’s paintings, drawings, and collages give voice to a poetic language of wandering lines, emblem-like shapes, and bold fields of color. His combined interests in the interaction and perception of color as well as the signifying potential of shape and line culminate in a visual art that teeters at the edge of representation and abstraction. In the tradition of Paul Klee, Storm’s paintings abound with shapes that seem to serve as obtuse ideograms: fusing sign and image into an emblematic but necessarily abstract and suggestive hybrid. 

With Mother of Nature, Storm presents a new body of work consisting of hand-sewn flags and oil and acrylic paintings. The flags, hung vertically, exhibit horizontal bands of color, each separated by a thin strip of white fabric. Like all flags, Storm’s are symbols of an abstract and even utopic idea, but in this case the central abstraction to which these flags are bound is the experience of color itself. Storm has separated the colors in the flags with white in response to his own color blindness – a condition in which color interactions, primarily between green and red, become highly confused. These flags associate sets of color intuitively, arranging color like the musical notes of a chord, while nonetheless offering the viewer clarity of perception for each isolated hue.     

Storm’s paintings feature bold and often spare compositions but also welcome recognizable motifs such as targets and keyholes, which are subtly abstracted through scale and context. Each of these images has the visual impact of an advertising graphic, street sign, or perhaps most appropriately a Theosophical thought-form. However, the seeming candor of these images is quickly eclipsed by the enigmas of shape and color that are Storm’s true interest. Storm’s careful balancing act between formal rigor and deeply intuitive and automatic image-making lends itself to an art whose focus is an ecstatic revelation of mystery.