Took a selection of paintings from the artist's website and made them into an (unauthorized) animated GIF.
A higher res version is here, without the slightly corroded patina.
The patterns remind me of Chris Ashley's work (new blog here). But Garcia-Fenech has been doing pictographic-style paintings since the early '90s. I knew the work in Texas--he moved to New York from there slightly before I did.
Garcia-Fenech calls the series "Swastikas."
Can someone explain this? The artist Julien Bouillon, linked to by VVork, seems to have re-appropriated a piece by drx (Dragan Espenschied)--from a series of MSPaint drawings based on spam stock tips.
This is from Bouillon's site (cropped, sorry). He titles it "Corporate Suite":
And this is from Espenschied's site (also cropped), which includes dozens of others and a system for rating them aesthetically:
What's the story here?
Update: I emailed drx, who said: "[t]hese are just pictures me and probably millions of other people received in spam emails. I got dozens a day during Winter 2006 and selected only the most beautiful ones. So nobody was [reappropriating anything]. On the other hand, i think i loved these spams more than anybody else and should get the world exclusive reproduction rights." My apologies to Bouillon for alleging that the coincidence had any negative intent, but I think I'd prefer drx's comprehensive slide show to a single spam as a lambda print.
Update: Not a clone, more like clonal offspring: Paul Slocum has been painting these spams on sweatshirts using puff paint.
These photos aren't from the Contemporary Arts Museum (Houston), where I saw the Mary Heilmann show last week; they are from the Secession in Vienna. The CAM exhibit looked somewhat like this, but the paintings enjoyed less wall space, the walls met at angles, not perpendiculars, the floor wasn't glossy, and there were no domineering overhead light panels. I liked the crowding and the cockeyed space--you could see more at a glance and note the all-important subtle differences in these thinly painted, deceptively simple canvases. The boxy seats with lawn chair webbing were a nice touch--I didn't ask if you could sit in them, fearing the answer would be no. Heilmann is the best of the smart dumb painters (abstract variety) and could teach the young'uns cluttering the galleries with their graduate thesis shows a thing or two about restraint, that is, knowing when a piece is done, but also how not to quit a work too soon. Her intelligently worked out pseudo-geometry, clunkiness of paint application, and exquisite eye for color make an unbeatable combo.
Two examples of "abject cyberculture" on view in large Chelsea galleries: Wade Guyton's "black paintings" a la Stella or Reinhart made with industrial-sized EPSON printers with clogged print heads (at Friedrich Petzel) and Thomas Ruff's gigantic "bad jpeg" photos of idyllic landscapes and manmade disasters, where "bicubic mush" resulting from saving images too many times creates a zillion Mondrians when viewed up close (at David Zwirner). Both shows shined and one wishes these dealers the best marketing this type of work to a collector class that values the "human hand" over everything.
It has to be said, though, that the copious cash necessary to produce both exhibits somewhat negates their would-be Arte Povera aesthetic. In addition to the untold EPSON cartridges expended on Guyton's show (the gallery put an image of the ink containers on the exhibition mailer in a "truth to materials" gesture), the artist carpeted the entire floor of the oversized warehouse space in wall-to-wall cheap plywood, painted austere, semi-glossy black. It's hard to convey without seeing it how much wood this is, but it's a decent sized shantytown or Broadway set's worth, at least. Concentrating on the paintings is difficult because you're constantly thinking about what's underfoot--an arbitrary, temporary surface trying too hard to "neutralize the white cube." It can't be done at Petzel, sorry.
Similarly, one does not want to contemplate the printing bill for the Ruff show--25 or 30 museum scale photos, flawlessly rendered and framed, their purpose to bowl you over with the sheer craft and tastefulness of their production so that you don't even remember that the subject is consumer technology (Photoshop) that anyone could mess with.
