Christopher Noxon: My First Solo Show in L.A.

I’m thrilled to share that my first-ever solo art exhibition in Los Angeles is officially open at Oxford House Projects in Hollywood. The show features more than 40 paintings, all created over the past year in my studio in Ojai, where the landscape is less a backdrop and more a co-conspirator.

The name Terra Incognita —Latin for “unknown land”— felt fitting for a show that explores the psychological terrain of place. These are landscapes, yes, but they’re also dreamscapes, meditations, collisions of memory and sensation. The process of making them felt like cartography with a wild streak: mapping not just hills and trees, but color, emotion, and energy.

The response has been amazing — and beautifully articulated in a recent review from critic Shana Nys Dambrot that asks, “Is ‘Pastoral Fauvism’ a thing? Because if it’s not, then it ought to be.” I love that. The term gets at the heart of what I’m aiming for: paintings that channel the natural world while simultaneously exploding it with color, movement, and feeling.

“Though the wild inventions of gymnastic perspective, kaleidoscopic palette, and fractal gesture pulse with the energy of hallucination or fantasy, anyone who has been to Ojai can attest to the recognizable cartography of his landscapes… The effect is both dizzying and radiant; his renderings of trees emote like portraits.”

Each painting is a response to a particular moment in the landscape—sometimes a place I pass every day, sometimes a view I glimpse only once from the side of the road. But always, I’m trying to catch something elusive: the way the light turns a eucalyptus grove electric, or the way the hills fold into each other like fabric.

“Germinating in the rich soil of Noxon’s maximalism is a proliferation of turquoise, lavender, amber, saffron, sage, scarlet, ivory, and day-glo ribbons, frolicking across fields of untamed details, seeking the never-ending surprises nature has to offer.”

The show lives in a space that’s unconventional and inviting: a quasi-domestic showroom in the heart of Hollywood, filled with good energy, odd corners, and great light. It’s the perfect setting for paintings that aim to bring the wildness of the outside world indoors.

Terra Incognita opened Saturday, May 17 and will be on view all summer. If you're in LA, I hope you'll stop by and take a look. The gallery is open by appointment—DM me at @noxonart on Instagram for details or to schedule a visit.

Thank you to everyone who came out for opening night, and to all of you who’ve supported this journey. Here’s to continuing to explore—and to finding the extraordinary in the everyday.

—Christopher