PLATO

Plato is excited to host Face the Music, Luke Osborn’s solo exhibition featuring mixed media paintings and drawings unified by the theme of music and exploring the power of collective experiences. The show will open at our lower gallery with a public reception on November 26th, from 6-8pm.

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For six days they stood on their rooftops and watched, and down from the mountains came music. These are lines from Luke Osborn’s poem inspired by the painting which he eventually titled with them. The key leitmotifs of this exhibition – music and sound – are manifested throughout the show: not only in the narratives – a crowd whistling to the rain, an audience gathered in an auditorium, a drinking party – but also in the syncopated colors, rhythmically repeated shapes, speech bubbles and actual musical notes, literal or abstracted.

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When Osborn embarked on the series during his summer residency at the Chautauqua School of Art, he started off with a solid resolve to create nothing but drawings. Yet after a stint of obsessively drawing non-objective shapes that vaguely resemble musical notes, he felt compelled to arrange them on canvas and to introduce human presence into the otherwise abstracted world. This experimentation resulted in a new language, both on the technical and pictorial levels. 

 

In terms of the image, Osborn combined his abstracted notes and human figures into unified compositions. He was guided by the early Renaissance painter Piero della Francesca’s method of suggesting depth through shapes and by the master of abstracted landscape Richard Diebenkorn. When it comes to the medium, the artist devised a unique method of combining drawing, collage, oil painting and watercolor on the same surface created by applying a mix of gesso and layered paper pulp onto canvas. The result is a stimulating and dynamic fusion of jagged lines, strokes, drips, color blocks and figurative elements; exhilarating, discordant and harmonious at the same time.

 

An intuitive search to draw individual shapes and faces has led to highly idiosyncratic depictions of collective experiences. Even instances of isolation suggest a presence of a crowd or a possibility to be embraced or consumed by it. In We’ve Never Dealt with This Before, a watchful sentinel, knight, hockey player, skeleton, armored policeman or all of the above in one, guards a forest or perhaps just a multitude of shapes suggesting a mass of people capable of confronting him. In Face the Music, a lonely figure in the ray of light is heading toward a stage. The crowd’s reaction oscillates between booing, crying, singing, gasping and shouting. The next few moments might determine whether he’ll light it on fire or bomb. 

 

Luke Osborn’s paintings investigate the joy, perils, power and seduction of group activities. Human gatherings are rarely quiet – they either emanate sound or happen in order to witness it. Perhaps we all are mere notes that are capable of forming a melody only when joined together, and it is our personal choice of whether to do it in harmony or in dissonance that determines the societal tune. 

Luke Osborn (b. 2002) is a mixed-media artist from Sausalito, CA, currently based in Rhode Island. His work has recently been exhibited at Thierry Goldberg Gallery, New York, NY (2024); ArtsinSquare (2024); Array Photo and Art Zine, Booooooom (2024); Sausalito Center for the Arts (2022); and Studio 333, Sausalito, CA (2021). He was the recipient of the Emerging Artists Scholarship Fund at Mill Valley Fall Arts Festival (2021). Osborn has participated in the following residencies and programs: the Chautauqua Institute Summer Residency (2024); Oxbow Summer Program (2023); Sotheby’s Summer Institute (2021); Idyllwild Arts Summer Program (2020, 2019); and Parsons Summer Academy (2018). This spring, Osborn will be completing his BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence, RI.

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