Eli Langer: Twelve Years from Earth.

ELI LANGER TWELVE YEARS FROM EARTH DANIEL HUG GALLERY LOS ANGELES

Twelve Years from Earth, Eli Langer's first LA solo show since relocating from Canada, exhibited polychromatic oil paintings rendered in matte pinks, purples, greens, blues and blacks. The seven paintings (five larger and two smaller) that comprised the show all demonstrate an aura of impending doom, and a sense of loneliness.

The largest work, Irrigated Planet (165cm x 250cm), an abstracted landscape, is the most defined of the group. A horizon line cuts the painting in half, above which a large, low-lying black sun hangs in a noxious-looking pink sky with purple and violet undertones. Below the horizon, across a flat, black expanse of land, run wide, pink, crosshatched rivers.

The spaces in Langer's paintings are, as he describes them, "otherworldly environments where man has become blurred with inner and outer space." In Pause in a Moment of Self-release a figure stands in the centre of the canvas, facing away from the viewer but looking back with a mixture of seduction and melancholia. As its title suggests, the work is infused with the feeling of brusquely remembering oneself after a period of total self-loss, like the catching of someone's eye that jars one out of unselfconscious dancing.

Langer's paintings could be said to be painfully awkward, but not because his skill is lacking. On the contrary, it is this awkward moment of rupture that he seems most fascinated by. This discord between mind and body is manifested by the space rendered in his work. In Pause in a Moment of Self-Release two receding planes on the lower left correspond to a defined spatiality suggested by other planes on the right, but float in unresolved space. It's as if Langer has superimposed two spaces onto the same painting.

In his essay "Postmodernism and the City," Fredric Jameson describes the hyperspace of architecture as something our bodies have not yet evolved to comprehend. Hyperspace, he writes, "stands ... like an imperative to grow new organs, to expand our sensorium and our body to some new, as yet unimaginable, perhaps ultimately impossible, dimension."

Although Jameson goes on to describe the Bonaventura Hotel in downtown Los Angeles, his description is still applicable to Langer's work. "Hanging streamers suffuse this empty space in such a way as to distract systematically and deliberately from whatever form it might be supposed to have," Jameson writes. Rather than the hotel's streamers, it is Langer's lines and planes which ultimately undermine his paintings' spatial logic.