Gallery: Gold

Golden Fire was exhibited in 2007 in Chelsea, New York City.  It is in the background of Ibarra&Fujimura: Live Painting in New York. Greg Wolfe wrote:  

That the culminating work to this sequence should be a monumental piece entitled “Golden Fire” has a sort of epic inevitability about it.  Gold is the quintessential element we think of as requiring the refiner’s fire.  It is a heavy substance that somehow lifts into what the writer Milan Kundera has called “the unbearable lightness of being.”  This element, found deep within the earth and created thought he turbulent processes of change, becomes something that symbolizes the eternal and unchanging.  Gold is the possession of kings, and yet we often speak of the common person as having a heart full of it.

Golden Fire II  was commissioned for a museum tour Nihonga exhibit in Japan (To-ki-Michi, A Survey of Contemporary Nihonga, Ueno Royal Museum, Hakodate Museum, Ishikawa Prefectural Museum, and twelve other museums throughout Japan). Fujimura continues the theme of "Fires of destruction and sanctification" that he began with Water Flames. Golden Fire II is on museum tour throughout Japan currently.

Exhibited at Dillon Gallery in 2008, and at Gallery Exit in Hong Kong in 2009-2010, Charis uses over a thousand sheets of Japanese gold foils in multiple layers over mineral pigment gestures.  Dillon Gallery press release notes:

"In homage to Willem de Kooning, gold moves in a dispersed, gestured movement. His interest in abstraction is in the essentiation of reality, which he believes, de Kooning was interested in as well. In that search, he creates space that is both flat and spatial. Gold is that paradox: it creates space (by being semi-transparent) and remains flat (by being mirror-like) at the same time. Perhaps the only way that an 'essential flatness' can be full of created space is by using gold."