Art review: Koganezawa at Christopher Grimes Gallery

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Projected as wall-size murals, three videos by Berlin-based artist Takehito Koganezawa emphasize the essential abstraction inherent in camerawork. A fourth projection makes an unexpectedly disturbing gag of it.

The silent, untitled murals focus on shimmering flashes of dazzling sunlight reflected on the surface of water, like diamonds randomly being strewn across black velvet; flocks of dark birds swooping rhythmically back and forth across a bleached-white sky, as if a Japanese screen-painting had been set in motion; and, in the longest loop (at 22-plus minutes), elaborate neon signs flashing and unfurling in vivid rainbow hues against nighttime blackness. All three are hypnotic and gorgeous.

They also emphasize Koganezawa’s compositional skills. At the scale of a wall, the video’s pixel-grid is enormous, forming a net-like armature that briefly captures constantly shifting hues. Absent any linear narratives, time and space collapse.

The neon projection is especially fine, a continuous sequence of almost imperceptible fades and cuts that never allows a viewer the chance to stop and read the changing, Ginza-type signs. Instead zeroing in on the movements and interactions of colored light, the projection is a video action-painting, more delicate than the muscular works of Sarah Morris to which they bear some comparison.

In the rear gallery, a video tightly projected into a corner shows the artist on the far wall attempting to catch indeterminate projectiles skimming along the side wall. Small dark blurs, ‘shot’ like little missiles from a video projector set on the floor, race toward the image of the artist; he grabs at them as best he can. Most elude his grasp.

Occasionally, though, Koganezawa appears to catch one, dropping the captured image to the floor. In the gallery’s corner a small pile of thin, black, cut-out silhouettes (animals, ghosts, abstract shapes, etc.) seems to accumulate at the artist’s feet, like Peter Pan’s disconnected shadow.

A sort of modified video game, the work suffers a bit from narrative gimmickry. But the suggestion that elusive digital imagery also has concrete behavioral and material ramifications is certainly compelling.

– Christopher Knight

Christopher Grimes Gallery, 916 Colorado Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 587-3373, Tuesday-Jan. 9. Closed Sundays and Mondays. www.cgrimes.com