Shinto shrines in the middle of Japanese woods are one of the central images of Claire Chêne’s current exhibition at FIG Gallery. They represent an introspective center of psychological and spiritual balance, being places of solitary rather than communal worship.

At the top of Yoyogi Hachiman a Shinto shrine sits nestled in a grove of trees that bend slightly inward as if to shelter it. The center of the shrine is open to the air (as befits a religion integrated closely with nature) and emanates a warm yellow and orange glow. The path that leads up to it is empty and quiet, and the atmosphere that surrounds it is one of peace. The white stone path in the bottom half of the painting that begins the path leading to the main shrine looks virtually vertical, only the gradual diminution of the size of its twelve rows of stones suggesting that it leads "back" to the space in which the shrine sits. A tall gray stele-like stone to its right accentuates its verticality. In other words, access to the shrine looks as if it first requires scaling a stone wall rather than simply walking down a "path," or removing some sort of psychological blockage represented by the white stones.

Yoyogi Hachiman with Tori offers a variation on the same theme of a difficult path in which the difficulty of reaching the shrine is a slippery and broken path rather than as a wall. The path is guarded midway on either side by statues of foxes with their ears alert to danger, as if they were there to startle human visitors.  The path between them is narrower, as if one might accidentally touch them in trying to get through.  The purple, brown and gray patchwork of the paintings path beneath the foxes is "edgier" than the clear geometry of the path’s upper reaches near the shrine, and the dark gray stones that sit to the lower path’s side seem to rest uncertainly on the ground, easy to dislodge, as if to emphasize a feeling of nervousness or trepidation. What stands in the way of reaching the shrine in this case seems to be the fears that visitors bring with them from the world.

Blessing  presents one pine tree looking out onto over a vista of gray clouds, while a whisp of white cloud wraps itself around the tree, merging into the sky. The solitary tree reminds one of a solitary person caught in thought at the remotest limits of nature, where the self confronts itself, while the whisp of smoke functions as a kind of "incense" from which the painting takes its title.

Path puts us on a dreamy path of stones that begins in water (there is no fore-ground) and recedes into mist, paralleling the shore of a body of water. At the painting’s upper left is a sketchy but solid grove of dark trees on the shoreline, balanced in the lower right by circular strokes of red and orange in the water that suggest moving carp. The upper right of the painting the artist has left an "unfinished" white mist that draws our eye. Only gradually, perhaps, do we realize that a path whose beginning we cannot remember and whose end we cannot know is a kind of dream metaphor for life itself. But something more seems to be going on. To make the path a beautiful but precarious one of stones in water is to suggest that we need to attend to our every step, lest we "lose our balance" and lose ourselves in the mist and water.

In Yoyogi-Hachiman--Monk's Garden, an acrylic piece on paper, Chêne paints the back of a Shinto shrine seen through the thick foliage of the forest behind it. In the sky over the distant mountains the sun is setting in orange and red, while the back door in the middle of the temple’s delicate wood structure (and square in the middle—or "heart"—of the painting) has also been painted red. The work may remind some viewers of Chêne’s beautiful large abstraction "New Forest" from her show a couple years back, in which a patch of red and orange throbs in the middle (or "heart") of an abstract but spatially deep lush green forest. The artist’s conclusion would seem to be that "spirituality" lies within, not without, and not in some quality of abstract belief, but in embodied human feeling, but also that the path of negotiating one’s way to it can be fraught with psychological difficulties.

In Hollywood, nude individuals and groups of bloody figures float in the space of a well-lit patchwork Southern California cityscape of pale pinks, blues and oranges, separated by a simple space that runs through the painting like a "boulevard." The painting has the atmosphere of an apocalyptic nightmare in which some disaster has beset thousands and tossed them naked and wounded into the streets. It is hard to tell what. Three sketchy helicopters hovering in the sky to check out the scene suggest some kind of sudden natural or social disaster like an earthquake or a riot. But some figures reposed in sleep under what look like gray blankets suggest something more long-brewing, like grinding poverty and homelessness—in which case the helicopters might represent some kind of disinterested curious and cold spectatorship of a situation that actually requires human intervention. In either case, the scope of the disaster is apparently enormous, as multiple ("cubist") chaotic views suggest. But the artist has not simply painted people in pools of blood. She has used the blood red to outline them—rendering their humanity, so to speak, in the medium of their suffering--a gesture that suggests an act of trying to empathize with their pain. The difficult spiritual path here (the path through this battlefield of a city) may be precisely not to become numb to the suffering.

Hollywood Ambition is a more expressionistic version of Hollywood. Helicopters in a red night sky descend on the city, one of them shining its spotlight below on a chaotic jumble of people and cars tangled in what looks like carnage. The painting seems poised between festivity and mayhem, as if some Mardi Gras in the street had turned into a riot. Perhaps the irony is that thousands seem to have rushed here to be in the helicopter’s "spotlight," as thousands rush to Hollywood in desperation fueled by blind ambition.

Yoyogi Hachiman

Yoyogi Hachiman with Tori

Blessing