Posts Tagged ‘Cerasoli Gallery’

Like anything worthwhile, finding art that you love and really respond to takes time.  It also means not only loving those pieces you keep going back to see at LACMA – to fill your home with beautiful pieces is an exploration.  Some collectors are avid watchers of the emerging artist market, others will employ an art adviser to scour the scene for them,  and still others may fall prey to the trendiest artist of the moment, hoping the piece they bought will go up in value over time. 

Freddi Cerasoli, owner of Cerasoli Gallery in Culver City, knows all about putting on display just what you love.  She recently opened her doors to the Fine Arts LA team and chatted to us about how she became involved with art, how exciting LAs art scene is now, and how grateful she is for this new, vibrant scene in Culver City – she was getting pretty bored of all the same old restaurants!  After opening her gallery six years ago and watching the Culver City art scene grow around her, Freddi has really developed a style and reputation for showing not only emerging artists, but emerging styles of art. 

The Cerasoli Gallery is currently showing Meggs, an Australian graffiti and graphic design based artist alongside Pure Evil and a host of others.  Opening August 22 is an exhibit of Roy Nachum’s work, which will take over the entire space.  Check out our video interview here and then plug the address into your GPS, you’re going to want to see what she’s got up her sleeve! 

There’s a small gallery in Culver City that smells of paint.  On Washington Blvd. in Culver City’s Arts District (which has never seemed like an arts “district” so much as a rather high number of galleries on the same street), Cerasoli Gallery has three tiny, charming rooms that smell of paint and house works by both emerging and established talents.  The gallery’s owner, Freddi Cerasoli, unites each room’s exhibit together with an underlying theme, whether on purpose or by happy accident. 

Currently on view are works by three different artists – each in his own room.  In the main gallery is Matt Phillips’ Out The Door.  His quilt-like patterns use these big prismatic blocks (and shocks) of color to reintroduce otherwise familiar shapes and spaces to you.  Mostly large canvases, Phillips uses oil and collage to get his disjointed, joyful point across. 

In the second gallery, you’ll find the artist whose work is like the middleman between Phillips and the artist featured in the third gallery.  Mario Wagner uses, like Phillips, these shocks of color to shift otherwise traditional spaces.  He’s fond of wide open spaces and often uses this image of a masked horseback rider.  In one image, the horseman looks as though he’s trying to forge a river made of color blocks.  Using acrylic and collage, Wagner’s paintings range in sizes and have a more vintage feel to them. 

You have to walk back through the main gallery to find the third gallery, but it’s worth the quick trip to find Seth Curcio’s pieces that, even though they’re the most different from the others, really work.  Curcio is no stranger to utilizing bright colors to reinvent a space or familiar image, but he uses color in a more organic way than the first two.  Where Wagner focused on open spaces like a field or meadow, Curcio explores outer space – but not in a sci-fi way.  He’s more interested in outer space as a new frontier than as the motherland of UFOs. 

Cerasoli is small, but mighty – and it encourages you to find your own underlying theme between the three rooms.  You may pick up on something nobody else had thought of yet! 

Matt Phillips, Mario Wagner, and Seth Curcio’s pieces will be on view at Cerasoli Gallery until July 8, 2009.  Please visit their website or call (310) 945-5974 for more information.