“Where to begin?” was the first question prompted by this dense selection of paintings produced between 1997 and 2007 by the Japanborn, Hawaii-based Masami Teraoka—his first Los Angeles gallery presentation in twenty years. The next question was something along the lines of, “Do I even want to take this on?” given that Teraoka was essentially bombarding the viewer with variations on a prevailing theme: The world is heading to hell on a jet. Aircraft did in fact turn up, and were a clear reference to the September 11 attacks, in Teraoka’s 2004 painting Semana Santa/Cloisters Workout; it quickly

Scott Olson paints small abstractions of irregular and fragmented geometries that give a somewhat unexpected initial impression of familiarity, age, and wear. The eleven oil paintings (on linen or MDF) that made up his Los Angeles debut employ distinctly traditional techniques from a century past and refer to the pictorial methods of early modernist abstraction; they repeatedly conjure, in their compositions and reduced size, the modest quietude of works by Paul Klee. They are heavy with an indefinite, though palpable, sense of history, as though they have been unearthed or rediscovered after