October 24, 2026
As part of the wave of New York galleries that set up shop in LA between 2010 and 2025, Karma, in West Hollywood, got the best house. Á la Goldilocks, the gallery secured a not too big, not too small home that they divided into perfectly proportioned rooms, with plenty of space for its impressive selection of books. In the smaller gallery was a tight little exhibition of modestly scaled paintings by another (and younger) Brazilian artist, Felipe Suzuki. The untitled works, all oil-on-canvas mounted on wood and made this year, featured monastically spare tableaux that recall the still lifes of Giorgio Morandi, but executed in a sun-bleached, Golden Girls–style palette. In one, a set of periwinkle, pink, and apricot planks resembling blanched John McCrackens are arranged vertically against a beige wall that stands atop a wispy gray floor. In another, a taupe tablecloth floats against a background that is nearly the exact same hue. The commitment to color and form here is so breathy and detached that it feels like these works might just melt into thin air. There is a gnomic or mystic quality to these images, perhaps most exemplified by the painting depicting a levitating stick of burning incense, its smoky plume interrupting the equilibrium of the two evenly spaced milky-blue and -red squares set behind it. Many might see these works as jejune trifles, but I found their barely-there mien endearing—quiet painting to the extreme, these are silent things that delight in their restraint.
