Jaimey Hamilton Faris

It has been over six years now since my first visit to galerie 103. At that point, gallerist Bruna Stude had been in a downstairs space in Kukui'ula Village, Po'ipū for less than a year. I was thrilled to see this world-class gallery on the South Shore of Kaua‘i; it marked a new era in Hawaii’s contemporary art scene and art market. For the Honolulu Star Advertiser I wrote about how its white cube space featuring Hawaii-based artists proved that the Hawai'i arts community, “instead of endlessly comparing ourselves to other art centers,” could “simply take pride in the fact that we are part of a vibrant global art culture — that internationally important art can and does happen here."

Having returned to the gallery multiple times since, and most recently to see its new location on the second floor in Kukaui’ula Village, my belief is reaffirmed. Hawaii is home to many soulful and gifted artists who dig deep under the tourist paradisiac veneer to express deep cultural roots and philosophical propositions. In the six years since my last visit, Stude has represented many of these artists at art fairs around the world while also featuring them in shows at the gallery. Even as the raw experimental energy of Chinatown and Kaka‘ako in Honolulu, Oahu, continues to mature, galerie 103, tucked in a quiet corner of Kaua‘i, still represents the best continuous effort in Hawaii to support and actively curate formal elegance imbued with striking visions about the course of humanity.

With the gallery’s most recent show, New Space/Fresh Paint, Stude celebrates the one-year anniversary of the second floor location by showing her stalwart commitment to her stable: a seemingly motley group of artists who make images and objects that range from pure abstraction to pun-filled pop. But no matter what their style, they all consistently offer beauty, humor, and a sober assessment of life itself.

In the front room, Tom Lieber’s luscious gestural abstractions continue to anchor the gallery with stately restricted black and white palettes with soft hints of umbers, ochers and lavenders. Awakening and First Light, both “freshly” painted this year, focus on areas of luminescent white paint. These give the impression of ripples of light in the center of darker energetic forces. It is amazing how Lieber seems to keep the best of the second-generation abstractionist school alive without it feeling forced, out of date, or too masculine.

Lieber’s paintings were paired with Stude’s own understated black and white abstract underwater platinum prints. These are incredibly responsive visual documents of the microscopic debris floating in the ocean. In the context of Lieber’s paintings, they resonate strongly as elegant gestural photos in which the artist collaborates with the vibration of the ocean and light to capture movement that would be invisible to the naked eye.

Both the paintings and the photos are balanced by David Kuroaka’s large ceramic and bronze vessels. Kuroaka is known for updating the Japanese wood fire raku tradition by using bold large organic forms burnished with rock salt, copper carbonate, and black soot to the point of exquisite sheen. His cast bronze pieces look at first sight like his ceramic vessels. Indeed, the faux raku painted surfaces of the bronzes are often paired with their ceramic cousins so that you can spend sometime determining the material relationships and difference between his two methods.