Wild colors explode across the epic images seared into Conrad Ruiz’s canvases. Bursting with epic drama, this San Franciscan’s paintings access the greatest heights of energy and excitement. Ruiz wields a strong comic sensibility, but his work has a secret depth brimming beneath its surface that transcends its endearing kitschiness. In his hands, the frozen image of a football coach being doused in Gatorade takes on a certain melancholy, and a glimpse of four track and field stars tumbling into oblivion amidst several pairs of whitey-tighties feels downright tragic. His stunningly detailed compositions demand your full attention and necessitate repeated views to meditate on their seductive mysteries.
It is equal parts intimidating/awesome to encounter an artist who can do everything under the sun. Literally everything.
Miss Lotion draws the kinda stuff you dreamed of drawing during dull moments in high school chemistry: perfectly-proportioned, expressive and loony ice cream trucks, smokestacks, helicopters, psycho cats, magicians and piglets. Also stunningly accurate portraits. Also cool typefaces and commercial illustrations. Also paintings and logo designs.
The Danish-born artist— “born with a pen strapped to her hand”—is clearly the kind of compulsive mark-maker who can’t help herself from filling pages. We hope nothing ever stops her.
Is it fair to call them the prettiest drawings in the world? Michael Krueger’s images of solitary figures in mystical landscapes are like encapsulations of the human struggle. Beautiful encapsulations! Each image is a mini-philosophical tract, doling out gentle lessons about vulnerability and progress and folly. Mapped against rainbow-striped skies, the figures contain all sorts of multitudes. Make sure your hankie is nearby, and don’t be surprised if a tear squeezes out.
Krueger teaches at the University of Kansas (count his students lucky) and churns out lithographs when he’s not putting pen to paper. Refer yourself to the great Fecal Face interview, and don’t forget that hankie!
You can often get a fair idea of what a book is like by glancing at the Library of Congress categorizations on the copyright page. In I Remember, a book by the late great artist Joe Brainard, these categories include:
*Childhood and youth
*United States—social life and customs 1945-1970
*Authors
*Biography
*Memory
I Remember isn’t a book in any recognizable sense of the word, though it does come printed on pages and bound with a matte cover. It is composed entirely of sentences that begin with the words “I remember” and form, within those constraints, an appreciable narrative. Excerpt:
I remember “Any little kid could do that”
I remember “Well it may be good but I just don’t understand it.”
I remember “I like the colors.”
I remember “You couldn’t give it to me.”
I remember Bermuda shorts and knee-length socks.
I remember the first time I saw myself in a full-length mirror in Bermuda shorts. I never wore them again.
And so on. Those familiar with Brainard’s work will dig the obtuse (but personal) entry into his thought processes. Those unfamiliar with Brainard’s work will dig it for what it is: a sweet, gnomic account of days long gone.
Nice to see an artist who isn’t afraid of deploying the color pink in a judicious fashion. Kyle Pellet dabs his paintings with Pepto Bismol-pink, flamingo-pink, cotton candy-pink and other variations of that difficult shade. It certainly makes for a pleasant viewing experience. You don’t realize how much you miss the color until you see it in action.
Contentwise, Pellet has a predilection for drawing rubbery humanlike figures going about their obscure humanlike existence. His illustrations and animations are also worth checking out, as is this neat little summary of the drawing process as it happens. Good stuff.
Ana Benaroya is a woman of many talents. First, there’s the incredible skateboard she designed for Furni Skateboards (above). Look at that thing! It would almost be a crime to commit it to noodle flips and switch 360 booger grinds, or whatever skaters do these days. That board belongs on a wall with some sort of security mechanism to prevent people from stealing it.
Issues of mechanical reproduction, unconscious art-making, and the beauty of chaos swirl about in Céleste Boursier-Mougenot’s charming work. The themes are well-worn, but the approach is lighthearted and inviting. This French artist and composer has a knack for misusing everyday objects to create alarmingly organic music.
For instance: Boursiey-Mougenot once jerry-rigged a grand piano to play musical notes translated from the text being typed on a random laptop. He’s also attached harmonicas to the end of vacuum cleaners to create otherworldly, organ-like noises. In the video below, the artist placed an amplified guitar in the middle of a gallery and then allowed dozens of birds to perch upon its sensitive strings, resulting in some surprisingly listenable accidental drone!
Pasadena-born Judith Linhares has been a working artist since her teens, which goes a long way towards explaining the painter’s complex language of symbolism. Sailboats, rabbits, women, skeletons, man-munching Amazons, fire, Snow White, honeybees and blossoms all find their way into Linhares’ work, realized in exuberant colors that belie a certain macabre undercurrent. Maybe more than macabre.
A sharp wit also finds its expression in Linhares’ paintings, and fittingly she counts among her influences Max Beckmann, Edvard Munch, Symbolist painting and Surrealism, all of which become evident in the fact that her images have a way of searing themselves into the more sensitive regions of a viewer’s brain. These are paintings, in other words, that are hard to forget.
In a 2006 interview in BOMB magazine the artist noted that Painters share in a long and complex tradition going back to the caves, which is both a pleasure and a burden. It’s a pleasure to see a Roman fresco of rabbits in a field and recognize the technical mastery and think, I am one of these craftsmen. This tradition is also a burden, because all painting is seen against a backdrop of this history. The challenge is to use what has been cultivated without being seen only in terms of historic style.
One of our favorite friends of WLYS has a big museum show this week in Montreal. He is showing some of the big diaramas he showed in New York two years ago and quite a few new pieces he did for the show as well as many drawings and some pieces from the Department of Eagles video he did with Patrick Daughters last year (below). I tagged along with Marcel this week. Here are some pictures of him setting up the show.
Aside from having a name with an excellent consonant-to-vowell ratio, Yuri Masnyj has incredible drawing talents, a knack for scuptural ingenuity and an eye for perfectly contained explosions of color. No kidding. Balancing swaths of skeletal white space with densely-packed inches of line and color, Masnyj draws inspiration from architectural drawings and graphic design to produce totally original works that engage directly (and rigorously) with art history.
Hailing from Washington D.C. and currently living in New York City, Masnyj “challenges the boundaries between media and, in the process, invites us into a fictive world in ruins that has all the ambiguities of our real one” (that’s from the Whitney Biennial catalogue.)
For pictures of the artist at work (and leaping in midair!), click here.
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