MAGNIFICENCE IN THE MIST
REGINA ARGENTIN AT CADFAB CREATIVE REVIEWED
By Mat Gleason

The first art gallery reception I attended after the pandemic lockdown ended was for a show of paintings by Regina Argentin at Cadfab Creative in Culver City. Even though she had painted them over the course of three years there were certain inescapable allusions to what we were collectively going through at the exact historical moment the establishment swung open its doors for the public to examine.

In her labor-intensive painting, the subject of emergence was everywhere. Here we all were, still masked save for the moment it took to pop a chocolate in our mouths, but we had all emerged, dressed up for the social event to celebrate pictures that extolled themes of revelation, of new existences, of the fog receding to reveal life itself.

Of course, not even this wickedly imaginative artist could have foretold the pandemic lockdown crisis during the years she worked on these paintings. But they do intuitively parallel the process of hiding in plain sight and being hidden despite a revelation having taken place. These themes abound throughout the culture, and one can imagine they will echo throughout the coming decade and maybe longer. And so we must call this work prescient, and that is still only one of the artist’s minor accomplishments.

We are greeted upon walking in the door with a picture emblematic of Argentin’s concerns in full bloom of the artist’s many talents. A blue-haired woman appears to be staring at us and yet, upon a cursory examination, we cannot be certain that she is looking at us as her eyes are obscured – by a floating sapphire brooch and a mid-flight butterfly with its wings extended. A little deeper glance shows her body to be obscured in a dreamy haze, the whole scene framed by a bejeweled naturescape wrapped in a bow. The artist is an exquisite renderer but isn’t interested in showing off more than she is in making an interesting picture. Boring precision would go against everything she composes and so the occasional paint splatter and drip runs amok here, a boldly assertive statement of art being liberated from decor. Leave predictability to the wallpaper, this is a real painting and the passages of liquid chaos are reminders of that to viewers who lose themselves in the lush precision of the rabbits and owls and jewelry that are spackled about Argentin’s scene.

Other paintings in the show saw animals centered as subjects . The artist made sure the mystery of these beasts was rendered intact in her misty layered brushwork. Her paint application obscures details in order to reflect a world where we never quite get a clear picture of anything. The mist in these works – revealing a nude here, obscuring a face there, conspire with flora, fronds and props to cover up her subjects just enough so that while we think we know what we are looking at we can never be quite certain. Is that not a mirror of the world in which we live, where fluid identities are embraced for empowerment and discarded for convenience?

Regina Argentin makes painting that is stylistically classical, colours it with a technological tint and renders the incomplete as masterful illusions of our hide and seek world. We lose ourselves in her luscious thoughtscapes but this changing world of ours pulsates throughout regardless.