‘What is it with dudes and trees?’ I wonder for a second as I’m about to put this up on-line—thinking more about Shakespeare’s pastoral romantic comedy than the cool oasis of a summer group show René-Julien Praz has curated at Praz-Delavallade’s L.A. premises. (Though I suppose I could ask Paul McCarthy, who produced a somewhat notorious rendition along these lines for Paul Schimmel’s landmark Helter Skelter exhibition for MOCA in 1992.) But then I’m a bit of a tree-hugger myself, though it would never occur to me to abuse them with romantic sentiments of any kind. (Nor political for that matter.)
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It’s all a bit too bright, which can only bring on dark thoughts; and it’s as if Kim McCarty is offering our eyes an oasis of calm in her two spare watercolors—her signature minimalist brush trace here rendered almost ghostly, what might be a trace of lavender pressed from the flower (of a marijuana plant) dissolving into the white paper as if into the light itself.
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