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9/2/2007

Two exhibitions

Lawrence Asher Gallery, Los Angeles

Paintings by York Chang and Greg Santos

This exhibition owes its title to a line in a Don Delillo novel that describes an entire mass media culture as morbidly transfixed on the visceral authenticity of the illusion of reality as on reality itself. It speaks to a culture that endlessly produces and consumes violent thrillers, conspiracy theories, advertising, pornography, science fiction, film, and television. This title resonates in the work of both painters who share a contemporary approach to the age-old project of painters: how to achieve a representation of reality that reflects their particular age and times. Both Chang and Santos look to today’s mass media culture for the idiosyncratic characteristics that our eyes interpret as documentary or realistic. More than a formal exercise, the two painters seek to delve into the emotional properties inherent in this imagery and each artist’s respective subject matter.

Santos’ “screen” paintings are a study in the eerie, washed-out, yet ever-familiar light that emanates from television sets. Painstakingly created through dozens of thin washes of oil, these canvases depict beautifully disconcerting images of shimmering skyscrapers and impending disaster that one might find while channel surfing with the late-night local news. Off the television screen and isolated onto a canvas, these moments take on an elevated meaning. Chang’s figurative paintings, on the other hand, borrow from the tropes of snapshot photography. He uses the light of overblown flashes to create a sense of immediacy in several portraits of men in crisis grappling with imminent defeat or conflict. His female portraits take a different approach, incorporating painterly effects that are reminiscent of slow-shutter speed photography, bringing an ephemeral, haunted quality to the canvas.

The Artists

York Chang is a painter and mixed media installation artist based in Silverlake, Los Angeles. His work has been exhibited in art galleries and festivals throughout Los Angeles, including the Lawrence Asher Gallery, the 2003 Absolut International Los Angeles Biennale, the 2004 and 2006 FreshStART, and the Santa Monica Art Studios Grand Opening. Art critics selected him for the 2004 TarFest juried exhibition for the LA Times and the LA Weekly. He also received a juror prize from James Elaine, the Armand Hammer Museum Projects Curator at the Los Angeles Art Association's 2004 Open Show. In November 2006, York Chang completed a two-person exhibition at the University Art Gallery at Cal State Dominguez Hills that was recently reviewed and recommended by ArtScene Magazine. He is an active member of the Los Angeles Art Association and Gallery 825, and is curating an upcoming painting exhibition with artist/curator Karyl Newman at the Pharmaka Gallery in Downtown Los Angeles' Gallery Row. York Chang was appointed by Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa in 2006 to serve as a Cultural Affairs Commissioner for the City of Los Angeles.

These paintings are a return to where painting began for me, with direct and indirect references to my heroes in painting: Goya, Francis Bacon, Gerhard Richter, De Kooning, Luc Tuyman, Rene Magritte, as well as my influences from celluloid and film, Wong Kar Wai, Wolfgang Tillman, and William Eggleston.

These figurative painting are divided into two groups, hombres y mujeres, investigating the moody, melancholic side of romanticism, through open-ended examinations of gender and tragedy- figurative portraits of men in spartan, wood-floored rooms being thrown from horses or caught in moments of aggression; women tangled and disappearing into the sheets on hotel room beds, captured in interior moments that oscillate between isolation and sensuality. These paintings seek to mine the emotional quality inherent in archetypes, still deeply entrenched in our collective psyche.

These paintings are also a progression of a body of work I have been building which draws aesthetically on the unchoreographed and authentic visual properties of snapshot photography, from the strange light and dark outlines around subjects which reference flash photography but also the long shadows of DeChirico's paintings, to the ghostly afterimages of time-lapse photography- an effect achieved with the use of thinned-out highly viscous oil paints which also bring a stronger material presence to the work.
--Y.C.

Greg Santos employs video and photography to create stunning, light-filled paintings that transfix the viewer. His recent body of work depicts utterly improbable images of staged peril and extravagant disaster. The paintings focus on subjects in direct proximity to injury and death and include a man ruthlessly carrying his infant son by one arm, a horse dangling upside down from a steel train trellis, and an indistinct, black form clinging to the face of a glass skyscraper. The experience is disconcerting. Although the situations depicted are incredible, they feel strangely familiar. This unnerving effect draws the viewer in and compels him or her to contemplate subjects on the brink of devastation.

Working from his own photographs of the television screen, Santos deals directly with contemporary perceptual experience. The results of these investigations are beautiful images of intimate proportion that emulate the transience of video and photography while still retaining the materiality of paint. The works are created by layering thin glazes of oil paint to create luminous, translucent surfaces. Closer inspection reveals gossamer figures interlaced to create an elusive and incandescent abstract field. Yet from the slightest distance, they coalesce into a recognizable whole.

These descriptions allude to the tenets of Impressionism, but Santos does not incorporate the traditional study of natural light and shadow. Instead, he focuses on representations of the electric light that emanates from the TV screen, a phenomena to which we are all intimately and psychologically connected.

Greg Santos recently received his MFA from the School of Visual Arts in New York City and currently lives and works in Los Angeles, CA.

Opening Reception: Saturday, February 10th, 6 – 10pm

Lawrence Asher Gallery
5820 Wilshire Blvd., Ste. 100 - Los Angeles

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