The year’s first exhibition at Susan Street Fine Art, “- is +: new abstracts,” is an exquisite look at complexity in simplicity. Los Angeles based artists, Jay McCafferty and Miguel Osuna, lead us into the mesmerizing world of idiosyncratic detail using magnifying lenses, solar heat, paper, ballpoint pens, resin and canvas.  Reducing their work down to the essential qualities of light, space, form and the detail of material, each artist creates an impression of something invisible within.

Jay McCafferty attended LASU for his undergraduate work and continued on to UC Irvine to complete his MFA. His photographs, videos and paintings have been featured in numerous museums and galleries since the early 1970’s. Looking back at thirty years of work reveals an essential consistency: Focusing sunlight through a magnifying lens at grid intersections plotted on paper, canvas and wood, entertaining the accident of phenomenology and introducing chaos to the rational field. His current work involves further dematerialization of the matrix and continues to use his carefully executed solar burn grids as an organizing device to express the formalist grid as more liberating than constraining. McCafferty keeps his process simple and up front while pushing to reveal the intellectual and emotional resonance of the work.

“A square of wall hosts burned fragments appearing free of the picture plane and signaling a new relationship between the wall, the work and the spectator.” – Jay McCafferty

Miguel Osuna studied architecture in Guadalajara before moving to Los Angeles where he began painting full-time in 2002. His work shows in galleries in California, Mexico and Spain. Osuna’s new series, “Infinite Within,” is a departure from his motion-based emotive landscapes in oil. Inspired by theories of universal origin, its extension and its limits, the artist is now looking inward rather than outward to his surroundings for inspiration. He considers this new body of work to be a “prequel” to the more conventional abstract landscapes he has produced in the past. With an incomprehensible level of detail, his ballpoint pen strokes on resin play with the concept of infinity and the endless connections between multiple points.

“In my studio, I am always experimenting with new techniques, mediums, and ways to create, I find it stimulating.  Shifting mediums is refreshing for me, and it inevitably leads to new visual effects, or new ways for me to interpret ideas.“ – Miguel Osuna