Charles Yuen's Crypto-Somatic Incantation at Studio 10 in Brooklyn

Charles Yuen's exhibition Crypto-Somatic Incantation ran from February 5th to 28th, 2016 at Studio 10, located at 56 Bogart Street in Brooklyn, NY. The show featured paintings that explore spiritual themes through an expressionist aesthetic influenced by Philip Guston. Yuen's work avoids the faux-naive style common in contemporary painting, instead incorporating existential humor and intuitive mark-making. Key paintings included Umpf, depicting a Boschian figure dragging a skull and fruit through a landscape, and Scarlet Prayer, a large red painting with waving vertical patterns and floating ovoids containing praying hands. Man With Tubers references Albert Pinkham Ryder's Marine of 1907 and Mark Rothko's compositional proportions, featuring a looping green line that forms a supine figure on the horizon. Yuen's technique involves repeating, freehand curved lines that ripple across the canvas without creating cheap optical effects. The artist has been developing this approach for about thirty years, positioning him as a progenitor of this expressionist style. His paintings embed consciousness directly into the image surface through color movement and spatial shifts. The exhibition demonstrated Yuen's ability to negotiate spiritual territory with the wisdom of a seeker's experience.