"The Space Between: First Light, Last Light”

by Liz Goldner

GW Contemporary, Laguna Beach, California

Continuing through January 4, 2026

Salomón Huerta, “Night Pool,” 2025, oil on canvas, 54 x 36 x 1 1/2”. All images courtesy of GW Contemporary, Laguna Beach.

Genevieve Williams, owner/curator of this five-month-old gallery, is enchanted by art that reveals abstract aspects of our atmosphere. As curator at the Laguna Beach based Honarkar Art Foundation (now closed), she mounted “Luminaries of Light,” displaying several translucent paintings and sculptures from California’s 1960s Light and Space movement.

Jeff Peters, “Monday Misses Sunday,” oil on canvas, 18 x 20”.

“The Space Between: First Light, Last Light,” with work by several artists from California and around the country, “explores the threshold between night and day.”  Paintings, lithographs and photos bring to light our environment in darkness, shadow, light and reflection. The exhibition invites meditation and what Williams calls “quiet illumination.”

Williams began putting this exhibition together after viewing two lithographs by the late, multi-talented Peter Alexander. “Gardena” and “Palmdale” (both 1990) from his “LAX Series” were created from his nighttime helicopter flights over Los Angeles, particularly over airports, when he perceived the city’s grids as geometric abstractions. He photographed the airfields to capture the lit-up grids, then painted the scenes and created lithographs. The resulting images with their tilted horizons capture the feeling of suspension above a luminous night-time city.

Sandrine Jacobson, “The Rose of the Morning,” 2025, oil on canvas, 36 x 24 x 1 1/2”.

Salomón Huerta’s “Pool Paintings” are inspired by his youthful experiences assisting his gardener father as they manicured the grounds of luxurious Southern California homes. Mining those memories and adding elements of surrealism, Huerta creates paintings that transform the private pools and their surroundings into enigmatic settings against darkened backgrounds. These are psychologically charged paintings that explore atmosphere, restraint and memory. “Night Pool” (2025) is an interminable body of dark bluish-grayish water, bordered by speckled lights peering from buildings in the distance and a shimmering night-time sky.

Jeff Peters contributes two large canvases, “Waiting For You To Pick Up,” and “The Line That Outlives Empires,” plus the smaller “Monday Misses Sunday,” (all 2025). They all play to the artist’s ability to capture dreamy scenes of radiant night skies and afternoon vistas. Using numerous layers of paint to achieve luminous surfaces, Peters constructs ephemeral scenes with slight images of figures gazing languidly into space, towards the horizon. Peters explains that his guiding interest is to, “explore the slippage between memory and invention, image and ideal.”

Katie Shapiro, “Blue Moon,” 2025, inkjet on glass, Amazonite, 5 1/2 x 4 x 3”.

Sandrine Jacobson’s “The Rose of Morning” (2025) is a luxurious rose-colored, non-figurative meditative exercise that captures the essence of a glorious morning. Her heavily layered oil painting connects and traverses the mysteries and reflections of the human experience with the natural world. The artist’s “She Is The Storm Rising” (2025) is a menacing image, depicting a burgeoning evening storm with clouds and rainfall descending on an ominous landscape. The contrast between these two paintings expresses the artist’s embrace of how the evolving state of humanity is mirrored by the ever-changing weather.

Tessa Greene O’Brien, “Blue Moon, Addison,” 2024, oil, bleach, dye wax resist on dyed canvas, 60 x 48”.

Katie Shapiro contributes six small sculptural works, each composed of inkjet photos of moons on small pieces of dark glass, all embedded into swirling abstract jet-black obsidian glass. Titles such as “Wedged Moon,” “Three Moons,” and “Moon in Rock” (2024-25) heighten the evocation of the beauty and mystery of the nighttime sky.

Tessa Greene O’Brien’s “Blue Moon, Addison” (2024), despite the “moon” of the title, comprises an entirely different artistic technique and environmental aspect. Her large canvas, colored and textured with oil, bleach, dye and wax resist, abstractly illustrates a moon during a time of weather-related turmoil. She deftly combines figuration with abstraction. By contrast, “Dusk Skies” (2021) by Mara De Luca is nearly as pitch black as a moonless night sky. The artist brings together in her work elements of illusionism, romanticism and modernism.

Depicting dawn to dusk to night-time as it does, “First Light, Last Light” demonstrates how each passing hour brings a new atmosphere, new aesthetic possibilities, and a new opportunity to open our eyes and start afresh.

Liz Goldner is an award-winning art writer based in Laguna Beach. She has contributed to the LA Times, LA Weekly, KCET Artbound, Artillery, AICA-USA Magazine, Orange County Register, Art Ltd. and several other print and online publications. She has written reviews for ArtScene and Visual Art Source since 2009. 

Liz Goldner’s Website.