It is not often that Santa Barbara can celebrate a significant new development in the realm of fresh, new contemporary art spaces and faces, which makes the arrival of the Seimandi & Leprieur Gallery a cause for celebration amongst art aficionados in town.
Open for just a month, the gallery is a welcoming, light-blessed, and spacious venue in a piece of real estate on Anapamu Street which, decades back, was the home of the famed original Bluebird Café. The erstwhile bluegrass and folk landmark is now a haven for art with a special focus on the strong art scene in the Caribbean, starting with the big and bold, yet subtle, contemporary-ancestral black-and-white paintings of Martinique resident Ricardo Ozier-Lafontaine, in an exhibition dubbed Fertilum.
Behind the gallery enterprise are the French couple Fanny Seimandi and her husband Julien Leprieur — she a former trial lawyer with a strong art background and he a former engineer and entrepreneur. Before heading to Santa Barbara with their family, they lived in Martinique for a decade and became fascinated with the unique work being done by artists in that region — including Ozier-Lafontaine.
In their range of future plans, the gallerists intend to also include artists of note from Santa Barbara. The gallery’s arrival coincidentally arrives at an auspicious moment for contemporary art hereabouts, given the surprisingly rich contemporary curation recently taking place just a block away at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art.
An internationally exhibited artist, born in 1973, Ozier-Lafontaine is making his U.S. solo exhibition debut in the gallery space, where his dramatic and contextually complex art effectively irradiates with sensory spirit. Forms and lines can be simultaneously amorphous and visceral, embedded with their own inner logic.
One important distinction is the artist’s palette, intentionally avoiding the profusion of color and tropical decorativeness we are trained to expect from Caribbean culture. The works may be stripped of color, per se (apart from token red dots implying anatomical energy or pilot lights), but they are anything but stark or lifeless. A certain suggestion of animated presence buzzes in the space through painterly gestures and visual rhythms and patterns.
The artist’s black-and-white pieces, sometimes epic in scale, are often explored through variations-on-a-theme series (“Aesthetic Research,” “Gestation,” “Syncretic Object”). They draw into their vocabulary elements of native history and archaeology, references to pre-Colombia, pre-Imperialist life, and a strong, abiding link to contemporary artistic impetuses and imprints.
The two most epic works in this show have a contrasting face-off relationship across the gallery space. “Aesthetic Research 16” evokes a gathering of creatures or cellular forms on a textured background, with kinetic rhythms afoot. Across the room, things get spicier and more quasi-figurative and sexual, with the twining and teasing figures in “Danse au coucher du soleil” (“Dancing at Sunset”).
With “Flowers Island,” the title itself nudges our reading of the imagery and potential plant life symbology, while the pair of paintings in the “Lovers” series are rooted in dense mazes of tautly drawn texture, almost like compacted schools of fish in a dreamscape. Hints of Op art’s optical play emerge, as well, along with whorls of visual action within the textural weave, like figures in interactive sensual motion.
On the back wall of the gallery, two impactful paintings — with visual energies and activity contained within ornate enclosures versus the all-over designs of other art in the room — go by the series title “Syncretic Objects.” ChatGPT informs me that the term refers to “objects that incorporate elements from multiple, distinct cultural or religious traditions, creating a new, unified form.” The hybridizing implication of the definition suits these paintings, specifically, and the cross-referential tilt of Ozier-Lafontaine’s art, more generally.
All in all, the Ozier-Lafontaine exhibition serves as a ripe and rippling introductory salvo in a new 805 art space well worth keeping eyes and tabs on as it moves forward.
Seimandi & Leprieur Gallery, 33 West Anapamu Street, open Wednesday-Saturday, 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. and by appointment. https://www.seimandileprieur.com/
