April 2015 Storybook in SF Weekly
March 2015:Leilani Bustamante Haunt in SF Weekly
September 2014: Sheri DeBow Daydreams and Nightmares From Beyond Toyland in Beautiful Bizarre Magazine
April 2014: Erika Sanada Odd Things in Hi-Fructose Magazine
March 2014: Henry Schreiber's "Hollerbound" and "The Grotesque" in SF Weekly
February 2014: Sheri DeBow and Nostalgia in the San Francisco Chronicle
January 2014: Feral Creatures Curated by Stephanie Chefas in Juxtapoz
June 2013's Fiction: 2nd Annual Portrait Invitational
Like forensic artists sketching suspects from victims' statements, 29 painters hope to better capture the essence of literary characters from their author's descriptions in "Fiction: 2nd Annual Portrait Invitational." Taking artistic license, tattooist Terry Ribera's scarred but victorious Captain Ahab draws from a scrimshaw pipe, while Brianna Angelakis' dazed and dejected Alice trips under a mushroom, and Mr. Dark from Something Wicked This Way Comes reclines, his countenance nailed by Catherine Moore down to the pale face with its "sun-yellow" eyes set beneath "licorice black" eyebrows. This pantheon of canonical heroes and villains spans the ages, from Lucius of Apuleius' Latinate The Golden Ass, to Madison Spencer, the teenage heroine in Chuck Palahniuk's novel Damned, both struggling through the underworld, separated by nearly 2,000 years. Men, beasts, or a bit of both, they save the human race in a spacesuit, or take lives one at a time in a Hugo Boss overcoat. —By Michael Singman-Aste
September 2012's Blood & Marble: Bradley Platz Solo Show
August 2012's Dark Art: A Tribute to Metal Group Show
July 2012's Myth: International Group Show
June 2012's Notorious: Curated by Bradley Platz
"Today's villains are sometimes tomorrow's heroes - and vice versa. And sometimes you get those people who aren't so easily defined, but have managed to become dicey cultural icons. This group exhibition of paintings by an international roster of artists is all about them, from Marie Antoinette to William Burroughs,John Brown to Sid Vicious. - Mary Eisenhart
The North Beach gallery was crowded with visitors Saturday night, anxious to see what Bradley Platz, co-owner of the gallery and a featured artist, called a "cohesive" exhibit.
"All the artists worked on these pieces for months and months. Sometimes with group shows, it's just kind of what everyone has at the time. But for this, everyone made a unique piece," Platz, who painted Marie Antoinette, said.
People walked around the gallery eagerly flipping through the price list that gave a brief history of each person portrayed -- and it was quite the cast of characters -- from bank robbers to poets, and journalists to mad scientists. Like the criminals themselves, the techniques used to create them were vast, including spray paint on street signs and oil on board.
May 2012's Pagan Poetry: Tino Rodriguez & Virgo Paraiso Duo Show
If you have seen Antony & the Johnsons' video for the song "Epilepsy Is Dancing," you have already begun to glean the lush aesthetic of Mexico-born artists Tino Rodriguez and Virgo Paraiso: an opulent fantasy world filled with carnivorous flowers, dancing skeletons, shape-shifting animals, bedeviling twinkle lights, and the all-too-perceptive looking glass. And that's just their apartment. Give them canvas and paint, and their imaginations flee from the laws of physics and the rules of man. At ease in the lowbrow art world, where surrealists and symbolists seek pop metaphors, Rodriguez uses fairy tale, myth, and idolatry from Europe and the Americas as a springboard into gardens of gun-toting fairies, swan-hearted gangsters, and rocking-horse meteorites. Armed with the hand of a Dutch master and the heart of the alchemist, Paraiso explores the liberation and frustration of metamorphosis: Hummingbirds sip from the flowers of human tongues, nymphs bathe under the gaze of cats, mermaids are ravaged by octopuses, erections become crowns of glory, and babies get stuck in spider webs. Bring Paraiso and Rodriguez together and you have "Pagan Poetry," an unearthly visual romance somewhere between Frida Kahlo's diary and A Midsummer Night's Dream. While individually interesting, Rodriguez and Paraiso's collaborations are works of pure chemistry - passionate, dangerous, funny, and challenging. ~SILKE TUDOR