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Painting
Federico Infante
California is having a Seattle kinda day, with chilly wind and cloudy skies, that tension of impending rain just seconds away that never actually breaks, and my mood reflects that melancholy steel gray sky. With some soft, slow jazz playing, the work of Federico Infante fogging up my mind, I’ve settled into a lack of clarity. Just letting the mist settle in and falling back into it is liberating in a way. Infante’s work pulls you into that same state, letting you be part of a quiet mystery; telling just enough of a story to involve you while leaving room for your mind to reach out on its own into the corners of the tale. I’m gonna continue to drift through this haze — it’s a nice vacation from the normally frenetic avenues of my thoughts. Thanks to the weather and Infante for this break.
Núria Farré
I don’t know what you think running this website is like, but in case you’re suffering under the assumption that I am inundated with emails day in and day out from new artists wanting to be seen, let me put those fears to rest. I am not. I get maybe one or two emails a month. Which is just dandy by me, because I’m busy with millions of other things from forging hammers to lying in the grass with my friends. Email doesn’t rank very high on my list.
A couple of weeks ago I got an email from a young artist from Barcelona, Núria Farré, and surprising even myself, I stopped and read it. And she’s good. Not a huge body of work at this point, but she definitely likes to challenge herself. Anyone that chooses to paint water is a masochist in my book, and that’s something I can respect in an artist. I especially enjoy her paintings of dead birds, which are a little softer, and a little more sparse. She’s young but she’s talented, and she’s tying her emotions into her work. I don’t think you can ask much more from anyone. And to top it off, her paintings make me want to go lay in the grass with my friends. For once I’m glad I opened an email.
Settai Komura
Winter is a time of secrets. It’s a time when the foggy mornings, the cold, crisp air, and the creeping darkness freeze the tongue before it can speak. The world retreats back into itself to sleep a long, silent sleep, and it takes you with it into the night. The fires in the still-beating core die to a warm glow, and we’re happy in our new quietude. Settai Komura paints these soft sounds and the world in which they slowly echo, wearing the mantle of Winter melancholy, unmoving but changing all the time. These are the paintings I tell my secrets to as I keep warm in the dusky haze of a flame, and in return they whisper to me their sad stories of forgotten Spring.
Anton Vill
Given a choice between tranquility and chaos, I’d have to say I prefer chaos. Looking out over a perfectly calm, glass-like lake in the still of the dawn, I am just as captivated as most people, but after about 30 minutes of quiet reflection I want to cannonball into that lake and shout my head off in guttural animal cries. Tranquility has no where to go; it’s already achieved the ground state. And what’s interesting about that? I even find myself arguing in favor of things I don’t support or have no opinion on as an exercise in chaos. The storm of ideas and tricky thought it conjures in my brain, and the loud, passionate discussions it causes in my conversational partners are my rewards. Artist Anton Vill embraces that same noise, fighting the calm, white blankness of paper with as much visual information as possible. His work is the ripples spreading away from our bodies as they disappear into the lake, and the howls that shake the sky to let the world know that we’re alive somewhere. Each drawing beautifully encapsulates the organized chaos that comes with being a living, breathing, animal — all the fear and desire tearing us apart little by little. Entropy claims first our bodies, and then our spirits.
Adam Tan
On days like today, when it’s cold and rainy outside, I like to surround myself with things that are soft around the edges. If I didn’t have to come to the office, I would be at home, swaddled in blankets, watching cartoons with a chubby dog snoring across my legs, slowly cutting off my circulation. With that not being an option, I instead have to find those soft edges elsewhere, like in the work of Adam Tan. Don’t mistake soft edges for soft, however. His subjects aren’t necessarily soft, just his style. Soft shapes, soft colors, a modern illustration style topped off with a touch of Impressionism. Like a jangly, lo-fi pop ballad about having your heart broken. The edges are soft, and so is the delivery, but the subject matter is a sharp shot right in the feelings. Perfect for a rainy day to keep me calm but alert — heart beat steady, but mind on fire.
Kevin Peterson
I am, without exaggeration, one of the greatest supporters of hyperrealism in the whole galaxy for all time. I might even be understating that. So Kevin Peterson was pretty much guaranteed to have my eyes submit to his wishes like puppies looking at a plate of bacon as soon as they saw his work. But then he also paints that wonderful hodgepodge of tags, stickers, burners and pieces that make up the visual turmoil of cityscapes, a subject that makes my skin tingle. Kevin Peterson, it’s some next level OK Cupid matchup that I have with your work. We were meant to be together, me and your paintings. I’ll take it slow, maybe a couple of online dates, then a visit to meet them in person in a gallery somewhere, and eventually I’ll ask one to move in with me. It’s kind of a polyamory relationship, so I hope your work is cool with that. It can be confusing at times, and we get pretty cramped for wall space, but we make it work. I don’t want to jump the gun and pressure a painting into moving too fast though. It’s cool, baby, let’s just go get some dim sum and let the future worry about itself.
Ikenaga Yasunari
It’s bleek here and bleeker elsewhere. To fight the cold inside and out, I will just stare at the paintings of beautiful, Japanese women. Join me, won’t you?
Seonna Hong: Persistence of Vision
I’ve been in this game for a fairly long time now, about a decade, which is a pretty good trick considering I’ve managed to stay under the radar of popular culture through careful sabotaging of my SEO, and not promoting this site in any way. What that has afforded me is the opportunity to sit back, relax, and watch artists build their skill sets over time, watch their visions and aesthetics change. I remember seeing Seonna Hong’s work back when she was first starting to get some attention from galleries. Her ideas have grown and matured, as have her abilities, and in my opinion what she’s producing now is the best work she’s done so far. She’s built her themes from experimental to purposeful, and it really shows. The contrast in her color choices, her use of negative space in her compositions, and the messages behind everything speak to an artist who’s getting closer to the perfect aesthetic conveyance for her subject matter. You don’t have to trust my opinion, even though I’ve been doing this for *cough* a fucking decade; go check out her show Persistence of Vision at LeBasse Projects in person if you can, or online if, like me, you never want to set foot in LA again. Thanks for joining me on this dusty journey through time, and realize that if you’re here reading this, you had to want it.
El Curiot
The Mexican street art scene has been going strong for a long time now, definitely long enough to have established its own visual voice. One of the things that I really enjoy about the aesthetic down there is the use of traditional colors and imagery, but twisted and knocked up for the modern era. That’s a pretty good description of Mexico in general actually. The works of El Curiot are an excellent representation of what I’m talking about. They seem hungry and active, full of life, frenetic, but they also seem to know exactly who they are, they’re firmly rooted in the culture they know and love. It’s one thing to make art for your own sake, and it’s another to make it as a declaration of love for and conversation with your own people. El Curiot seems to me to be doing the latter, and doing it with some serious finesse. Gets me all itchy to find some abandoned brickwork and make things happen.