K. Imperial Fine Art is pleased to present Introductions, a group show featuring the work of three talented artists who are new to the gallery's programming: Martin Javier Palottini, Hadley Radt, and Mario Trejo.

Argentinian artist Martin Javier Palottini creates impossibly flawless faces in pencil with perfect accuracy while relying on sparse content to complete his figures utilizing thread, gold leaf, or other mixed-media. It’s within the emptiness of these rudimentary gestures that lies a wealth of meaning.

Palottini was born in Buenos Aires in 1981. From 1995 to 2001 he attended Manuel Belgrano National School of Fine Arts, where he graduated as a Teacher of Drawing. In 2011 he attended the School of Higher Education of Artistic Development, where he received his degree of Professor of Fine Arts. He has been the recipient of numerous awards including First prize at Akian Gráfica Editora Competition (2015). His work can be found in the permanent collections of Banco Central de la República Argentina, Colección Ministerio de Seguridad, Museo de Artes Plásticas Eduardo Sívori, Museo de Dibujo y Grabado Artemio Alisio, Museo de Bellas Artes de Tandil Mumbat.

Hadley Radt’s paintings explore the connection between systems in our environment and how they relate to her own impulse to construct order. And her constructed order also incorporates constructed chaos, including tangled patterns and mis-marks, intentionally interrupting the systems that she builds.

I am exploring terrains of connections; physical, psychological, emotional, neurological. I am interested in the depiction of these connections and tracking layers of information. I am curious how the viewer is able to move through the accumulation of marks, finding their own pathways to navigate. – Hadley Radt

Radt received her MFA from California College of the Arts in 2017 with a BFA from Sonoma State University. She’s exhibited extensively throughout the bay area and in 2016 she was awarded the Edwin Anthony & Adalaine Boudreaux Cagodan Scholarship. Hadley lives and works in San Francisco.

Mario Trejo’s works are comprised of thousands upon thousands of carefully-controlled marks. It’s not merely a devotion to mark-making or methodical persistence but a larger understanding of the macro vs. the micro and makes visible the invisible energies that animate the tangible world.

My work features extensive accumulations that visually explore eternity and struggle through manic mark making. Considering the concepts of time, space and number, I create hundreds of thousands of marks, exhibiting conscious and sensitive attention to both detail and the whole. I begin to form small universes, each a relic of the arduous performance of repeated gestures. reconciling personal experience with the ideas of measurement and disorder in conceptual layers; the compulsive mark reflects the eternal battle between myself and my surroundings, but the product becomes a facsimile of the sublime remoteness of the universe in miniature, revealing at once loneliness, futility, chaos and uncertainty. This work is a metaphor for the fragile imperium under which we all reside. – Mario Trejo

Trejo was raised in Saint Louis, Missouri and currently resides in Seattle, Washington. He received his BFA in 2005 from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago followed by his MFA in 2008 at the San Francisco Art Institute. Trejo has exhibited both nationally and internationally in Canada and Japan with two museum shows.