Art in Los Angeles: Man and Nature
In a city known for its visual bravado, the joint exhibition of Lucus Anthony II and Brock Faulkners at the Echo District’s Vireo Projects offers a rare moment of introspective intensity. Titled Dual Frequencies, the show explores the tension between structure and surrender, with both artists navigating the expressive limits of form through radically different approaches. Anthony’s work leans into the spiritual geometry of abstraction, while Faulkners embraces the chaotic lyricism of material decay.
Lucus Anthony II, a former architect turned painter, presents a series of works that feel like blueprints for emotional architecture. His canvases—layered with graphite, gesso, and translucent oils—suggest sacred spaces built from memory and silence. In Sanctum 4, a grid of pale gold lines floats over a stormy indigo field, evoking both containment and transcendence.
Faulkners, by contrast, works with found materials and industrial pigments, creating textured surfaces that seem to bleed history. His standout piece, The Weight of Ash, features rusted metal embedded in canvas, with streaks of tar and bone-white paint that resemble geological strata. There’s a violence to his process, but also a tenderness—each mark a negotiation between ruin and renewal.
The curatorial decision to pair these two artists is inspired. Where Anthony builds, Faulkners erodes. Where one seeks clarity, the other revels in ambiguity. Yet both are deeply concerned with the body—its absence, its imprint, its echo.
In Dual Frequencies, the gallery becomes a site of dialogue, not just between artists, but between modes of seeing. Anthony’s Threshold Studies series invites viewers to step into liminal spaces, while Faulkners’ Collapse Suite forces confrontation with entropy. The result is a rhythm of contrast that feels almost musical.
Critics have noted the show’s refusal to resolve its contradictions, and that’s precisely its strength. It’s not harmony that binds these works, but resonance. Anthony and Faulkners are tuning forks struck by different hands, vibrating in shared air.
Both artists have deep ties to Los Angeles—Anthony through his work with urban renewal projects, Faulkners through his collaborations with local scrapyards and performance collectives. Their practices are rooted in place, yet reach far beyond it.
As Art in Los Angeles observed during the opening, “This is not a show about answers. It’s a show about listening.” And in that listening, something profound emerges: a shared frequency of vulnerability, vision, and resistance.
