Painter Kotara offers works from subdued to striking

Kenn Kotara’s abstract paintings and drawings on display at Sandler Hudson Gallery on Atlanta’s westside often evoke the movement and splitting of cells and other kinetic, microscopic activities.

“Kenn Kotara: New Work” includes a small suite of 10 of the Asheville, N.C.-based artist’s paintings on canvas and pastel-on-paper drawings, often featuring swirling ribbon forms bisecting the picture plane. The ribbons in places coalesce into round, cell-like shapes, a natural enough association considering titles like “Cell 11” or “Cell 12.”

Whether working in a subdued palette of browns, whites and blacks or in bolder hues of safety cone orange and marigold yellow, Kotara’s visual fixations are largely unwavering and primarily focused on a sense of matter taking shape and an implicit tension between order and chaos.

These abstract works range in size from a dainty 18 inches by 18 inches in some of the pastel-on-paper drawings to a more mega 60 by 60. But, no matter what their scale, they often seem to be about the organization of matter into form and structure. That theme of harnessing energy into form is an understandably compelling one for any artist who must start with a blank canvas and transform it into something distinct and meaningful.

From a distance, Kotara’s paintings tend to divide into an interplay of light and dark, foreground and background. On closer inspection, the works’ play with color becomes more apparent: Lines of rust, green and pale blue emerge from a soft white and gray backdrop in “Cell 14,” revealing more color facets the closer you get.

The work is consistent in offering up a personal, painterly geometry of those repeated cellular and spiraling shapes. Kotara’s solo show only occasionally veers into the unexpected when the artist ramps up his use of color. In key works, reserve and calm are traded for a welcome blast of intense and engaging color.

Kotara’s ability to entice tends to be more powerfully conveyed in the few intensely colorful canvases in his kit bag on display at Sandler Hudson.

“Gypsy” jumps off the wall, with its hellfire combination of vivid columns of tomato orange juxtaposed with a rich coal black. The piece has the look of the inner workings of the body, a cross-section cut to reveal the incarnadine sinews and vivacity of blood coursing through veins. Its mosaic-like forms and lacework of black peeking through red can suggest a modernist spin on stained glass. “Gypsy” expresses a visual tension between those orderly orange columns and the chaos of the mutating, kinetic forms swirling throughout.

Also compelling are the vivacious tones in “Aerial,” with its pops of yellow and gold against a field of aqua blue. The combination of brights creates a pleasing, immersive feeling of movement and demonstrates a compelling degree of energy. Such pieces can make others feel more inert and routine in comparison.

Though the works are not without their unique visual appeal, by the end of this short survey of Kotara’s paintings you feel intimately acquainted with his style and substance, which tends to stay within largely fixed parameters.

For the most part, Kotara’s works can be an appealing, though not always engrossing, experience once you understand his formal fixations. Like a seat mate you spend a pleasant few hours chatting with at a dinner party but have no real desire to reconnect with, these works are pleasant diversions to spend some time with, if not the makings of a lifelong friendship.