Yoshihiro Suda, Camelia, 2006, wood painted with rockpowder, 10 x 7 x 9 cm

Some art exhibitions practically scream at you while others reward a closer, more patient scrutiny. The ten artist group show, The New Verisimilitude, curated by François Ghebaly,  and shared between Culver City’s François Ghebaly Gallery and West Hollywood’s M+B, actually does both.

Examining how contemporary artists re-present reality, each work delivers the immediate punch of a seemingly recognizable object, while at the same time calling attention to either the laborious back story of its creation and/or the materials that were employed in the process.

Highlights include: Japanese artist Yoshihiro Suda, who carved and painted a single piece of wood to render a gorgeous, delicate flower which is placed as if popping out of the wall.  The piece suggests not only the reality of a flower and an ethic of delicate craftsmanship, but the enchanting and upbeat possibility that intense moments of beauty could possibly show up anywhere and at any time.

Argentine-born painter Victoria Gitma‘s oil-painting of a purse  is more than just a representation of the beaded, desirable consumer object it portrays. It is a painstaking exercise in replication – with each and every bead carefully rendered in paint. Somehow her contribution transcends its surface and hovers somewhere between a representation and the object itself.

Victoria Gitman, On Display (detail), 2008, Oil on Board, 14 x 12 inches

And Berkeley born, Los Angeles resident, Isaac Resnikoff, delivers a stack of chairs, carved from a huge piece of wood. A representation of neither an object of beauty nor of consumer desire, but instead a portrayal of the sort of thing that fills a storage closet taking up space until needed for a practical purpose – the piece nevertheless  calls attention to its laborious creation  – playing against the cold anonymity of the objects that it represents.

Isaac Resnikoff, 2011, Carved wood, 20 x 17.5 x 108 inches