THE Magazine - Los Angeles

Painters Richard Amend and Christopher Martin Hoff tell stories by capturing the narrative essence of a place. Buildings, landscapes, and interiors are rendered with a vision that is at once playful and disorienting, all the better to tease the viewer into imagining a personal fantasy landscape. Amend's recent paintings and drawings have evolved concurrently with his work as a production designer in the film industry and express an attention to both structure and light. His thoughtful negotiations with negative space, structural harmony, and external constructs such as street signs and roadways beguile the viewer into thoughtful reverie. During the 1970s Amend painted expressionistic patterns that were based on mathematical grid systems. Later on in his career, when he began designing sets, his ability to conceptualize and render his visualizations dovetailed nicely with the new requirements of his work. Site location photos became the raw material for sketches of pastel drawings, and places such as the baroque movie palaces of downtown Los Angeles and the austere Salt Flats of Utah enriched Amend's subject matter, all filtered through personal experience. Windows, doorways, road crossings, and openings in the forest are recurrent elements in his work, with an attention paid to capturing the stillness of a singular moment and a particular quality of light. Nicely complementing this work are the urban landscapes of Christopher Martin Hoff. The artist aptly refers to himself as "an urban `plein-air' landscape painter," and though some of his paintings can partly read as blueprints of construction sites, Hoff's structures freely traverse conventional concepts just as fluently as they reconfigure them. Says the artist, "Hidden within a cracked section of pavement, a rust-stained dumpster, or colorful graffiti are stories. By peeling back some of the extraneous layers of this urban fabric, my series of paintings invite the viewer to become a creative collaborator in assembling these stories."