Press release for upcoming show at Pence Gallery in Davis, which, in all honesty, looks terrific. Reception, Friday, October 11. The 2 should be a superscript, as in Reality Squared. Reality2 Curated by DeWitt Cheng In the digital age, with instant communication available, the public is ceaselessly bombarded with information, usually light on analysis, but correspondingly full of partisan sound and fury, signifying nothing or very like nothing. But reality cannot be concealed forever. Americans are aware now, after thirty years of corporatization, offshoring, downsizing, and declining living standards, and a dozen years of war in the Middle East, that things have gone badly awry. Artists have often served as cultural critics in the past, and some continue to do so. Paradoxically, traditional artists employing the methods of traditional realism—creating windows into alternate or superior realities— may be the best people to point out the unreal core of consensus reality. Reality2, curated by the San Francisco art critic DeWitt Cheng, presents six figurative painters from northern California—Arthur Bell, Mark Bryan, William Harsh, Michael Kerbow, Chris Leib, and Mr. Lucky (aka Pierre Merkl)—who leaven their cultural critique with irony, imagination and humor, and exemplary craftsmanship. Through satire, they help us deal (square ourselves) with things as they are, illustrating what a long, strange trip it’s always been, as their spiritual predecessors Hieronymous Bosch and Pieter Bruegel knew only too well. Arthur Bell’s “The Motorcycle War,” for example, depicts as huge battlefield, brown and desolate, that may remind viewers of historic battle paintings of the past with their knights and chargers; here, however, the knights joust atop low-slung choppers, in an aimless scrum around a mysterious figure in sunglasses and cardinal’s hat, seated, motionless, in a tricycle wheelchair. Mark Bryan’s “The Pilgrim” wittily skewers the use of religion and divine authority for worldly (geopolitical) purposes, with its true believer making his arduous way up a mountain path to bring another missile to a Gothic cathedral with ICBM spires or columns—and an all-seeing Masonic eye, to boot, for a rose window. William Harsh’s untitled mixed-media drawings depict military tanks as comical surrogates for the artist and the viewer: armored and turreted, they bristle with aggression, or, rather, try to; their anthropomorphic body language, however, reveals the normal human fear and hesitation that basic training are designed to counteract. Michael Kerbow considers current economic and ecological dangers in his works; his two “Fool’s Game” paintings depict the earth, covered by interwoven freeways, a rat’s nest tangle of traffic, endlessly circulating. Chris Leib’s “Bonobo Baby” revisits the primate/astronaut dichotomy of Stanley Kubrick’s film, 2001, making subtle fun of Homo sapiens’ sometimes dubious, violent wisdom, especially when compared to the peaceful, intelligent behavior of our humbler cousins. Mr. Lucky’s paintings of imagined persons (which may derive from the artist’s work as a private detective) reveal, if not innate bad moral character, which we do not believe in these days, then at least bad behavior; his “The Smell of Fun” is a contemporary, secular redo of Bosch’s deservedly famous “Crucifixion,” with its menacing, grimacing human demons. Reality2 will run at the Pence Gallery from October 1 through November 10. A reception for the artists will be held Friday, October 11, from 6:00-9:00pm, after a talk by the curator at 5:00pm. Admission is free.
Posted on: Fri, 27 Sep 2013 15:28:46 +0000
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