We Love You So – Where The Wild Things Are – Spike Jonze

Colombia-born Juanita Cardenas has lived in Bogota, Miami, New York, Buenos Aires and Barcelona. Her drawings? We love ‘em. Her puppets? Freaky and rad. Cardenas has a talent with color (dig her virtuosic use of pink—not an easy hue!) and an eye for unexpectedly pleasing compositions; there’s no doubt about either of those things.

We’re equally entranced, however, by the artist’s sketchbooks, which are been scanned and offered up for greedy eyes to devour. Each turning of the page reveals a fresh experiment, whether that be a figure drawing or a tangle of lines or a rainbow of abstracted faces, like sherbet spilled across the paper. Totally enchanting.

Peter Nencini’s Hand Werk boxes are sets of materials and forms designed for abstract play. The components—made of wood, plastic, ceramic, rubber and fabric— are “mostly designed and cut to combine with counterparts sourced from school science lab suppliers for example, have a character that sits somewhere between board game bits, measurement tools, ambiguous accessories for clothing, for eating.”

The object of the sets is to encourage truly imaginative play; that is, play free of rules, goals, guidelines or restrictions. Nencini provides forms that beg to be touched and stacked and rearranged, then lets viewers do the rest. Each kit is boxed in a plain brown container and comes without instructions. Brilliant.

Andrea Carlson’s paintings have names that would seem to belong to late-eighties grindcore bands: “Cannibal Ferox”, “The Poison That Is It’s Own Cure”, “Vaster Empire” and “End of Trail”. These are extremely alluring titles, promising high-tempo paintings with aggro lyrics and long wavy hair. Happily, the paintings do not disappoint.

Carlson is a wacky genius, drawing on an encyclopedic breadth of objects and topics for her work. In her statement she writes, “The objects and texts represented in my work are displayed hovering like holy icons, floating and centered on the page. As these objects dangle over the seashore like a carrot, the shore rises up, itself fluid, all-consuming and assimilating as the earth takes back and buries it’s histories.”

To which we can only say, “Aw, hell yeah,” and pump our fists in agreement.

Being a talented painter of a certain kind living in New York in the 1980s, Donald Baechler was lumped in with Jean-Michel Basquiat, Keith Haring and Kenny Scharf as a constituent of a certain downtown art scene. In reality, his work didn’t share many concerns with the graffiti-influenced aesthetic of his peers. Baechler’s singularity may or may not have something to do with his longevity, which is impressive. Clicking through his early paintings into the later flower paintings, crowd portraits, and sculptures is a trip in the best sense of the word.

Take a peek at the artist’s studio here, and check out this mini-profile in the T Magazine blog, in which the artist reveals as inspirations his striped socks, backyard, and three de Kooning drawings which he found on eBay for fifty bucks each. Score!

Visually speaking, the categories of “beautiful” and “challenging” overlap far less frequently than they should. This applies to any creative pursuit: architectural, musical, sartorial, and most definitely when it comes to painting.

Paul Wackers’ work exists in that tiny shared zone between the two categories. His paintings of abstracted machinery, natural growth and mountainous landscapes are as thought-provoking as they are stimulating, mixing recognizable geometric elements with head-scratching piles of…well, interesting-looking stuff.

Wackers’ paintings remind us a little of the psychedelic dreamscapes (nightmarescapes?) of Kirsten Deirup, but there’s no doubt he’s doing something all his own.

New favorite painter alert! Mary Iverson’s subject has long been the Port of Seattle, graduating from plein air studies to examinations of the area’s cranes, construction lines and shipping containers. (Side note: anyone who was into the second season of The Wire will find special pleasure in the aesthetic of ye olde shipping docks.)

When she recently switched focus to the Port of Tacoma, Iverson studied the port’s annual report to calculate the average number and size of shipping containers entering the port on a daily basis, then used this information to create 952 plywood replicas of the shipping containers. Rearranging these models in various combinations supplied the subject matter for Iverson’s new paintings, which do all sorts of neat things with abstraction and geometry.

Check out Iverson’s upcoming show at San Francisco’s Park Life!