Various Small Fires proudly presents Eight Artworks by Los Angeles-based artist Kohshin Finley at its Texas gallery. The exhibition of recent paintings is the artist’s first solo presentation with the gallery and in the American South.
Eight Artworks features portraits of significant people from the artist’s community, including family and close friends. Equipped with a camera in hand, Finley captures candid snapshots of his subjects to use as source material for expressive works on canvas. He translates these moments of everyday life into scenes that suggest the heroic and monumental. Deeply interested in portraiture’s ability to construct one’s legacy, Finley creates an elevated platform for his subjects.
We find each subject within a moment of introspective reflection. Finley’s figures do not gaze back at the viewer but peer down or off into the distance, encapsulating a powerful vulnerability. In many of the works, less than half of the figure’s face is visible, reflecting the artist’s interest in capturing an aura rather than a qualitative likeness. The man in Portrait of Ron, With His Menagerie, 2022, has his back turned completely toward the viewer in a relaxed contrapposto. Finley leans into the compositional device of ruckenfigur by compelling viewers to form a connection not through a visible facial expression but by observing the subject’s environment and objects like the gloves and garden shears that peek from his back pocket.
Finley’s stylistic choices mirror his conceptual ambitions. His use of grisaille recalls the use of grayscale paintings in art history to imitate marble sculpture. Like the symbols of prestige and care these sculptures stand for, Finley’s paintings emphasize the importance of attending to and upholding his community. In contrast to the artist’s early hyper-realistic work, the paintings in Eight Artworks are executed with expressive brush strokes that capture the immediacy of fleeting moments.
