Los Angeles Times Calendar — Galleries

By Marlena Donohue

New Mexico artist Carlos Quinto Kemm makes intimate, power-packed glass collages that have the frenzied clarity of hallucinations. He appropriates bits of macabre printed imagery, collages it to sheets of glass and adds careful detail with pigments that look like aged varnish or tin foil. The tinselly surfaces, the figures set on – and then behind glass – create that indefinite, claustrophobic space of our worst nightmares. Exotic and erotic narratives of lust, discovery, resurrection and death appear culled from a subconscious run amok, then reigned in by Kemm’s innate knack for form and anecdote. The excellent “Soul’s Birth” is a Bosch-esque little figure with the head of an erupting pod and the male anatomy of an erect pine cone. “My Phoenix Love” is a queer talon-footed nude reclining in a dark arbor.