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Casper Brindle, Light Glyph VF, 2022, pigmented acrylic, 44 x 74 x 8 inches

Transcendent Matter
Casper Brindle + Alex Weinstein
July 7 to August 26, 2023

NANCY TOOMEY FINE ART
1275 Minnesota Street, San Francisco

Nancy Toomey Fine Art is pleased to announce an exhibition of works by Casper Brindle and Alex Weinstein titled Transcendent Matter on view from July 7 to August 26, 2023. The gallery is located inside San Francisco’s Minnesota Street Project, 1275 Minnesota Street. Gallery hours are Thursdays, Fridays, Saturdays, 12pm to 4pm, and by appointment–please contact nancy@nancytoomeyfineart.com or 415-307-9038.

The public is invited to meet artists Casper Brindle and Alex Weinstein, in town from Los Angeles, at the gallery on Saturday, July 8, from 5pm to 7pm.

Alex Weinstein, Ocean State 8, 2022, polyester resin, fiberglass, oil paint, 40 inches diameter

Transcendent Matter brings together Los Angeles-based artists Casper Brindle and Alex Weinstein. The two, life-long surfers and close friends, present a shared reverence for the sublimity of landscape with their seductive output. The exhibition features new, wall-based sculptural work made of mass-cast resin and vacuum-formed plexiglass. Both artists’ use of non-conventional materials highlight a shared interest in expanding the vocabulary of art process while riffing on well-established movements of the recent past. Each artist’s work has an ebullience of its own but their processes are quite different. Brindle’s acclaimed Light Glyph series employs industrial production techniques and his immaculate sculptures flirt with reductive austerity while joyously juxtaposing effusive color. By comparison, Weinstein’s Ocean State sculptures are decidedly tactile, sensual objects created start-to-finish by hand. Exploring the heft, hue and rhythm of the sea, these quieter works have a personality bordering on portraiture. The show’s focus on materiality commingles references to Minimalism, Light and Space and Finish Fetish art production of the 1970’s LA scene while expressing a renewed enthusiasm for subject, bordering on romantic, which in turn gifts the exhibition with a vibrant contemporary pulse.

Casper Brindle, Light Glyph (Avo), 2023, pigmented acrylic, 23 x 10 inches

Transformative and mysterious, Casper Brindle’s newest series, the Light Glyphs, continues his investigation into the expressive possibilities of color and form while utilizing new materials and modes of production. A most ancient form of communication, a glyph is a symbol or mark carved in relief to convey ideas without words. These enigmatic pieces tend more toward sculptural object than painting, each a single sheet of shimmering metallic color encased in a transparent shell, punctuated only by a radiant central form. A glowing push and pull ensues as the viewer circles the piece, the object before them shifting before their eyes. The slim bar of neon color that cuts through the picture plane invites a quiet reverence, as form seems to materialize from the abyss, in an act of technicolor alchemy. The rigidity of the hard-edge shapes and boundaries of the picture plane is softened by the use of un-expected and sensuous color. The tension in these works presents the viewer with a series of intriguing dualities; they seem to float in the space between reality and illusion, the finite and the infinite. The repetition of form and brilliant swathes of color create a visual language that becomes a meditation on experience and perception.

Alex Weinstein, Ocean State, (sun lolly, early bird), 2022, polyester resin, fiberglass, oil paint, 20 inches diameter

Alex Weinstein writes about his Ocean State sculptures, “I come from Rhode Island, the Ocean State, and titled this series for my old home. Of course the title works as a double entendre for an emotional and/or physical state too and that association is vital to the project. The work itself is made from surfboard manufacturing materials: resin and fiberglass and is part of a larger body of work I started in 2003 called swell models. Using those materials has always felt authentic to me (a lifelong surfer) and a continuing chat with the LA artist forbears I have come to know so well. I use oil paint to tint my sculptural work and everything is made by hand. The shapes are based on feel and experience, not 3D scanners and C&C machines. The color comes from the landscape via my paint tray. To me, the magic of the Western skyline, dusted with jet fuel and the surging Pacific below it, present a type of chemical optimism. That pulse is the heartbeat of my work.”

Casper Brindle

Born in Toronto in 1968, Casper Brindle’s family relocated to Los Angeles in 1974, and he has called the city home ever since. Growing up surfing the beaches of LA’s coast undoubtedly made a profound impact on the artist, influencing his use of color, materials choices, and visual vocabulary. Brindle started painting as a teen, and in his early twenties he apprenticed for the pioneering Light and Space artist Eric Orr. Brindle’s work has been exhibited across the United States and internationally, and written about in The New York Times, Art in America, and LA Weekly. His work is held in a number of prominent private and museum collections including the Frederick R. Weisman Art Foundation and the Morningside College Collection in Sioux City, Iowa.

Alex Weinstein, photo by Thomas Sanders

Los Angeles based artist Alex Weinstein’s work has been exhibited throughout California as well as nationally and internationally. Weinstein’s art has been both featured and reviewed in The New York Times, Art in America, and Los Angeles Times, as well as other journals. He has been profiled in numerous films, including Mana, which resulted in an exhibition at the Lancaster Museum of Art and History. In 2014 Weinstein was the subject of a book/film/gallery project titled The West is the Best by French industrial designer Joran Briand, which resulted in a number of exhibitions throughout France. Weinstein has published numerous essays on contemporary art in The Surfer’s Journal which have included substantial profiles on the work of Casper Brindle, William Mackinnon, and Mary Heilmann, among others. In spring of 2023 Weinstein was asked to co-curate and author the statement for an exhibition exploring the overlap of “beach culture” with the mid-century aerospace industry, local to the area, for the City of Manhattan Beach’s municipal gallery.