INGLEWOOD CATHEDRAL

As a native Southern Californian, throughout my life, the ‘Fabulous’ Forum in Inglewood has always been a ‘Temple’ of sports and music, where I heard and saw everyone from Led Zeppelin to the Lakers. Now, the stunning spaceship, So-Fi Stadium has arrived as another place of worship, but it is the trees of Inglewood that continue to beguile me and hold my interest.

The paintings of Inglewood trees in Inglewood Cathedral, represent a naive proposal; what if the trees that line our streets, and in fact all of nature, were to be seen and felt in our minds as sacred? The archway, commonly employed by architects to demarcate the transition from a mundane exterior space to a sacred interior, can be seen in Inglewood as a canopy of trees providing not only shade and oxygen, but also a passageway to a profound moment of mystery for those open to feeling it.

A painting too can be a kind of passageway to a sacred place. With the Inglewood Cathedral paintings, I wonder, and hope, the reverence we have for art can be extended to all that surrounds us. As we step under their unassuming branches, what if the cathedral begins here, on North La Brea Ave., on Centinela Ave, on La Cienega Blvd? 
                                                                                                                                               – Lucas Reiner, Los Angeles, 2023

Inglewood Cathedral   - Lucas Reiner          
by Shana Nys Dambrot                                         

The groves were God’s first temples. — William Cullen Bryant

The heady sensation of horizons expanded, roots rediscovered, the dance of the strange and familiar, old and new—it’s an archetypal tale of travel and inspiration. As painter Lucas Reiner admired the majestic trees flanking Ferraro, Italy’s San Benedetto church, his mind and eyes fresh from the glow of an exhibition of Chardin paintings, he noticed their domed coiffures and cathedral-like rise of archways and filtered light. He spent time with them, photographed them, and in 2010 made a suite of 67 monoprints inspired by them. Later, outside the Inglewood studio where he’s worked since 2011, Reiner came to see that his neighborhood’s trees held the same shapes, and the same power.

That Reiner would focus on trees is not a surprise—and not just any trees, abstracted or generalized, but specific, individual trees, as unique as people and remembered in the same way. Urban trees have been a recurring subject in his work for decades. He jokes that people still alert him to particularly eccentric trees around the city, particularly those who have suffered the ungentle, anti-aesthetic touch of city maintenance workers. It’s something of a miracle that the trees which inspired Inglewood Cathedral have thus far escaped the more violent impact of civilization on trees. Reiner also undertook a series of paintings based on the Stations of the Cross, with trees enacting the emotional tableaux. He’s been further interested in post-abstraction strategies for provoking the psyche in the absence of narrative; he thinks a lot about Rothko’s ideas on distillation and “personal icons” and what constitutes devotion.

The diaphanous, penumbrous paintings in Inglewood Cathedral represent a synthesis and evolution of all these ideas—formal, material, art historical, philosophical, spiritual. What if trees were treated as the radiant and sacred beings which they are. What if such trees are the real cathedral, whether on North La Brea Ave. or in a piazza in Ferraro, or anywhere and everywhere. What if the Old World and the New World swapped places, and Caspar David Friedrich stood in nature but looked inward toward his soul. What other mysteries would an elevated quality of attention reveal to us about the world. Why does nearly every spiritual tradition and human-dreamed cosmology have a story about a tree. What formal and material techniques are available to an artist to express the glory of the overlooked.

To give these esoteric ideas concrete form, Reiner renders trees with the patient attention of portraiture, employing a lexicon of architectural materials and evocative facture that infuses the works with an object quality that’s as much holy relic as contemporary abstract—like burial shrouds or the rough stones of an ancient wall. In some ways the trees themselves are performing architecture in their form and effect, creating a liminal space for transporting from the mundane to sacred, unifying a duality. Muslin is backed with a mixture of gesso and marble dust, which is pressed through its weave to form grounds with a mottled surface; the tempera is forced to find its own level across this topography. Like that paint and those trees, humans too must always adapt to the circumstances in which we find ourselves; neither we nor the trees choose where to be planted. But also like the trees, we are a radiant and sacred part of nature, and we would do well to remember this no matter where we find ourselves.
                                                                                                                                                           
                                                                                                                                                        — Shana Nys Dambrot, Los Angeles, 2023