It's Perfectly Natural

Nicole Buffett’s “Matriarch” is a new exhibit of abstracts by the Berkeley painter. Her work often features a star character: A recurring shape that’s half lace bit and half thready, gossamer jellyfish, it attaches itself to fields of poured paint in little schools, like animals. Together, the shapes behave like platelets or insect eggs, gathering in patterns and demonstrating a mathematical relationship to each other, but only in that scientifically inconsistent way that platelets and insect eggs have. These shapes — they’ll never build what we call a civilization. Around them are sandpapered clouds of greens and browns (Buffett is rumored to leave canvases exposed to elemental mayhem, aka outdoors, for a spell). They could be space clouds or underwater clouds, but neither of those have cracks or spraypaint. Batik echoes and rust rivulets appear, but seem to only hover in the backgrounds. The result is organic, but far from innocent.

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The opening reception for “Matriarch” starts at 5:30 p.m.
Sept. 1-Oct. 1, 2010