“Can the outside of a church be as sacred as the inside? A painting too can be a kind of passageway to a sacred place, and with the Inglewood Cathedral paintings I wonder if the reverence we have for art can be extended to all that surrounds us. As we step under their unassuming branches, what if the cathedral begins here, on North La Brea Ave., on Centinela Ave, on La Cienega Blvd?”
– Lucas Reiner.

ARCANE Space gallery is pleased to announce the launch of its fall season with Inglewood Cathedral, a solo exhibition of paintings by Los Angeles and Berlin based artist Lucas Reiner. In this body of work the trees of Inglewood, normally a background element for the urban environment, are foregrounded to become the subject for a kind of devotional portrait, suggesting an expanded, empathic vision of urban nature as resilient and sacred.

Since 2001 Reiner has devoted himself to the theme of the unobserved urban tree in sustained contemplation. Starting with photographs and sketches taken enroute to his Inglewood studio, he paints their ‘portraits’, as they grow, some crooked, hindered or maltreated, on the sidewalks of the city. Executed on canvas with a subdued palette of tempera and wax, his minimalist intimate portrayal of the Inglewood trees is a distinct departure from traditional landscape painting. His trees are imperfect – their wounds imposed by the hostile, urban environment where they are rooted and radically manicured by man as urban obstacles. The trees ultimately, triumphantly self-correct in their vertical pursuit of light and infinitude. Abstracted from their urban setting and celebrated through his portraiture as sacred individuals, his trees are the protagonists of our urban life, whose oxygen, shade and sanctuary evoke the cathedral of nature.

“For Lucas Reiner, it was admiring the majestic trees flanking Ferraro, Italy’s San Benedetto church, his mind and eyes fresh from the glow of an exhibition of Chardin paintings, and noticing their domed coiffures and cathedral-like rise of archways and lofty, filtered light. He photographed them and made a suite of 67 monoprints about them. This was in 2010. Later, outside the Inglewood studio where he’s worked since 2012, Reiner came to realize that the neighborhood’s trees, backlit by the glow of the new megawatt stadium arena, held the same power.” – art critc, curator, author, Shana Nys Dambrot

The exhibition will include a film by Reiner made at the invitation of the Silverlake Film Festival, Trees in Los Angeles. Shot in 8-millimeter black and white, and filmed and edited by Heather Seybolt, the static camera as witness creates portraits of individual street trees throughout Los Angeles - and made for the exhibition, a limited edition book of images from Inglewood Cathedral.

This is Reiner’s first solo show in his home city of Los Angeles since 2009. Since 2010 he has been exhibiting his Trees and Stations painting cycles primarily in Europe.

Inglewood Cathedral   - Lucas Reiner         
by Shana Nys Dambrot                                          

The groves were God’s first temples. — William Cullen Bryant

The heady sensation of horizons expanded, roots rediscovered, the dance of the strange and familiar, old and new—it’s an archetypal tale of travel and inspiration. As painter Lucas Reiner admired the majestic trees flanking Ferraro, Italy’s San Benedetto church, his mind and eyes fresh from the glow of an exhibition of Chardin paintings, he noticed their domed coiffures and cathedral-like rise of archways and filtered light. He spent time with them, photographed them, and in 2010 made a suite of 67 monoprints inspired by them. Later, outside the Inglewood studio where he’s worked since 2011, Reiner came to see that his neighborhood’s trees held the same shapes, and the same power.

That Reiner would focus on trees is not a surprise—and not just any trees, abstracted or generalized, but specific, individual trees, as unique as people and remembered in the same way. Urban trees have been a recurring subject in his work for decades. He jokes that people still alert him to particularly eccentric trees around the city, particularly those who have suffered the ungentle, anti-aesthetic touch of city maintenance workers. It’s something of a miracle that the trees which inspired Inglewood Cathedral have thus far escaped the more violent impact of civilization on trees. Reiner also undertook a series of paintings based on the Stations of the Cross, with trees enacting the emotional tableaux. He’s been further interested in post-abstraction strategies for provoking the psyche in the absence of narrative; he thinks a lot about Rothko’s ideas on distillation and “personal icons” and what constitutes devotion.

The diaphanous, penumbrous paintings in Inglewood Cathedral represent a synthesis and evolution of all these ideas—formal, material, art historical, philosophical, spiritual. What if trees were treated as the radiant and sacred beings which they are. What if such trees are the real cathedral, whether on North La Brea Ave. or in a piazza in Ferraro, or anywhere and everywhere. What if the Old World and the New World swapped places, and Caspar David Friedrich stood in nature but looked inward toward his soul. What other mysteries would an elevated quality of attention reveal to us about the world. Why does nearly every spiritual tradition and human-dreamed cosmology have a story about a tree. What formal and material techniques are available to an artist to express the glory of the overlooked.

To give these esoteric ideas concrete form, Reiner renders trees with the patient attention of portraiture, employing a lexicon of architectural materials and evocative facture that infuses the works with an object quality that’s as much holy relic as contemporary abstract—like burial shrouds or the rough stones of an ancient wall. In some ways the trees themselves are performing architecture in their form and effect, creating a liminal space for transporting from the mundane to sacred, unifying a duality. Muslin is backed with a mixture of gesso and marble dust, which is pressed through its weave to form grounds with a mottled surface; the tempera is forced to find its own level across this topography. Like that paint and those trees, humans too must always adapt to the circumstances in which we find ourselves; neither we nor the trees choose where to be planted. But also like the trees, we are a radiant and sacred part of nature, and we would do well to remember this no matter where we find ourselves.
                                                                                                                                                           
                                                                                                        — Shana Nys Dambrot, Los Angeles, 2023

As a native Southern Californian, throughout my life, the ‘Fabulous’ Forum in Inglewood has always been a ‘Temple’ of sports and music, where I heard and saw everyone from Led Zeppelin to the Lakers. Now, the stunning spaceship, So-Fi Stadium has arrived as another place of worship, but it is the trees of Inglewood that continue to beguile me and hold my interest.

The paintings of Inglewood trees in Inglewood Cathedral, represent a naive proposal; what if the trees that line our streets, and in fact all of nature, were to be seen and felt in our minds as sacred? The archway, commonly employed by architects to demarcate the transition from a mundane exterior space to a sacred interior, can be seen in Inglewood as a canopy of trees providing not only shade and oxygen, but also a passageway to a profound moment of mystery for those open to feeling it.

A painting too can be a kind of passageway to a sacred place. With the Inglewood Cathedral paintings, I wonder, and hope, the reverence we have for art can be extended to all that surrounds us. As we step under their unassuming branches, what if the cathedral begins here, on North La Brea Ave., on Centinela Ave, on La Cienega Blvd? 
                                                                                                                                              
                                                                                                            ­­– Lucas Reiner, Los Angeles, 2023

NOVEMBER 17 - DECEMBER 17

Opening event by invitation
November18th 5 -7 pm

 Artist Talk
December 10 Sunday, 2 pm
please RSVP - space is limited
Reserve your space

Friday - Sunday
(Thursday by appointment)

open 10:30 - 4:30pm

for more information: info.arcanespace@gmail.com