art - others

Top: James Havard, Flat Head River, 1976, acrylic on canvas, detail

Bottom: Desaxismundi, detail of untitled work, 2008

The abstract illusionist movement was a one-off trend from the late '70s and is generally considered to be kitsch. Essentially it consisted of painting airbrushed shadows into Cy Twombly-esque gesture paintings; James Havard was the star of the "movement" but he has since completely changed his style of working.

Many painters I know confess a secret admiration for these works.

The "generative art" movement, where computer code defines the parameters of an image that snaps into existence more or less instantly, is growing on me. Partly because it is "something new under the sun" where conventional painters are trapped by their medium and recycling old tricks. Partly because it is getting better--in terms of the image-makers building error and accident into their process.

The black and white image by Desaxismundi is undeniably seductive--you have the circles casting Havard-like shadows, which might be too precious by themselves, but also these shimmery bands of visual noise breaking the white emptiness of the "background." A nice tension results between platonic forms and eruptions of dissonance. It's very musical.

I had slides of this Houston-based artist's work, which I shot back in the early '90s when I organized a show of his paintings, and felt like scanning them. Click on the lower two for enlarged views. The multipanel piece at the bottom was an older work, possibly dating from the '70s, that was rolled up in the artist's studio.

I like the combination of Di Chirico-esque mood and modern emptied-out-ness. The bottom image has a underground comix feel but is also classically surreal. At the risk of sounding like ad copy, no one in Houston (or anywhere) does work quite like this. Possibly some of the Chicago imagists but without their illustrator-y sense of polish.

The paintings are done in acrylic. House has a technique of layering washes of thinned out black over a finished image to give a kind of fractal scrim livening up the paint's inherent flat inertness. It's kind of an artificial aging patina but has nothing to do with making it look old--just more complex.

The imagery is a series of personal symbols that recur from painting to painting and are constantly mutating and being layered and violated by Modernist stripes, dots, etc. There is something cabalistic about it but House isn't a mystic or a new-ager. He talks about the symbols in an almost childlike way but his approach to assembling a picture is quintessentially grown up.

Revolations from jeff at Double Happiness.

Montage of zooming products and annoying acid guitar loop. It's hard to improve on the commercial stuff that's out there (which is not to say we don't try). "Our displays know no limits; bringing you brands that SELL." (Not an exact quote.)