On October 6th, the WWA Gallery in Culver City opened a group show entitled “The Noise In the Basement”. Overall the work in the show is good, however what stood out the most for me was the art of Joka. I have seen his work for a while now but was really taken with these new pieces. Every painting by Joka is created with the use of toothpicks, so in the style of the pointallists during the late 1880s, Joka goes even further and uses toothpicks in a technique he calls “hyperpointallism”. The works are colorful and have multiple layers. Pointallist works tend to blend smoothly when you are at a certain distance, and then break into the dots that create them, but with Joka’s work the closer you get you see the dots, but there is so much more there that it ends up creating this dense texture. In a way it reminds me of the grain found in certain types of films with a high iso. It looks amazing. Head on over to Joka’s Homepage for more, and then over to the gallery for the rest of the show.
