Entwined mythologies and snippets of urban life

By Victoria Gail-White
Advertiser Art Critic

•	Don Ed Hardy and Mark Kadota 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Through Jan. 29 Robyn Buntin Oceania Gallery 545-5572

Here, he has crossed cultural boundaries and philosophies and conjured up some new mythological creatures.

Hardy's "Big Eagle" is a combination of the Japanese tengu (bird man), Garuda (mythical bird of the Hindu god Vishnu) and a 19th-century Plains Indian. This painting (and a few others) are done in his "ghost writer" style with white paint on a moody, deep indigo background.

Not one to take himself too seriously, a rare and wonderful quality in an artist, he sneaks the hairdos of the 1950s (butch cut and pompadour) into his companion compositions "Butch" and "Link" of

lohans (Buddhist who have attained Nirvana) behind scholars' rocks. Both are painted in a classical Chinese brush style.

In the 6-feet-high "Burning," Hardy has taken the angular form of the Chinese Shang Dynasty dragon and combined it with the Mayan feathered serpent-god Quetzlcoatl, creating powerful effigy-like imagery.

In the paintings "Pluto" and "Twisting Amigo," he juxtaposes broad abstract brush strokes and drips of paint with twisting detailed dragons that appear as if they spontaneously emerged out of the abstracted chaos. These paintings sing.

Hardy supplied the narratives for his work and Aisha Buntin provided reference pictures. These placards are an asset to the exhibit and reveal the work in a more profound way.

Mark Kadota's two new series, very different in style, capture glimpses of our lives in moments of solitude and the temporary beauty of flowers and humans.

In "Contemporary Solitude" a group of 10 (8-by-10-inch) oil painted canvases show candid-like snips of urban life — a woman with headphones on, two men sitting at an outdoor bar, the back of a person sitting on the floor with a laptop. They are primarily monochromatic (with minimal flesh tones), giving them a ghostly appearance. Each black wood frame has a small light bulb above it and a plug below it, as if you could plug it in and light up the color and action in the painting and walk right into it.

Kadota writes in his statement, "Art work, at its best, mirrors society and our interior selves, raises questions, and presents communication and reflection." In this new work, he is also prophetic and poetic.

In the second series, "Flesh and Bloom: Diverse, Fragile and Temporary," a wall of small canvases of sensuous peony, iris, lily, tulip and gladiolus blossoms are interspersed among close-ups of ears, hands, feet and knees.

The luscious colors and blending of these works is Kadota at his best.

They exude a voluptuous unfolding, erotic yet accessible.