reviews ROGUE WAVE 07
rogue wave 07:
12 artists from Los angeLes
LA LOU VER GALLERy, VEnicE
28 JUnE – 18 AUGUst
Into the inescapable tepid sea of summer group shows rushes LA Louver’s Rogue Wave 07, the third in its self-curated series taking stock of the West
Coast’s most promising emerging talents, with a few young-at-heart stars thrown in for context. Though there’s no claim made to a defining statement
of current LA art – unlike the Hammer Museum’s coinciding Eden’s Edge – a character emerges nonetheless. The Hammer’s is a survey of artists who
institutional curators feel have made the best case for LA art’s significance over the last decade; the Louver’s presents what a powerhouse commercial
gallery believes will come to define the next decade. Given those differences, crossovers of individual artists would be unlikely (there are none), but the
pairing offers a rare and satisfying set of coordinates for anyone looking to define a recognisably LA aesthetic.
Common strategies include an affection for humour (it puts audiences at ease), a healthy awe of nature (LA is surrounded by majestic landscapes),
a cynical intimacy with the construction of media-based manipulations (we know how it’s done, we’re the ones that do it) and an endearingly curious
devotion to making things by hand when it isn’t absolutely necessary. The artists of Rogue Wave address the paradox at the heart of Los Angeles, a city
whose very existence defies nature’s laws, and which has made it its business to efface its own history, the better to become all things to all people.
Joseph Biel’s immense watercolour and graphite drawing Compound (all works 2007) presents a landscape depicting a structure in remote
ruin, slumped amid a field of empty schoolroom chairs and scattered bricks, whose power resides not in its inscrutable narrative, but in the neurotic,
Herculean task of its making. Sandeep Mukherjee’s exuberant, hypnotic Untitled acrylic on Duralene paintings are every bit as exhaustingly wrought,
with thousands of individual dabs of colour applied, removed and reapplied like a chimerical mosaic before resolving into kaleidoscopic images that
embrace yet transcend the unpredictable, asymmetrical perfection of a marine wilderness. Portia Hein’s muscular, unsentimental landscapes and
Timothy Tompkins’s chipper large-scale shiny commercial
enamel paintings of the military-industrial complex’s
nefarious deeds both acknowledge the nightmare hidden in
the California Dream. Meanwhile Tom LaDuke’s expertly
rendered paintings of his own studio, reflected in the slate-
grey of a TV screen, and Ben Jackel’s lavishing of advanced
sculptural technique on a flawless recreation of a fire hose in
stoneware and ebony, deliberately place skill in the service of
cheeky irony, indicting fetishism while careful to let the viewer
in on the joke.
Perhaps the most compelling reason to experience
these exhibitions in tandem is the very real sense of a torch
being passed, a generational refinement of a consistent set of
ideas. The older generation demonstrate a more discernible
relationship to conventional form; never letting go their
grasp on modernist abstraction, academic draughtsmanship
and postmodern conceptual ambiguity. At Louver the new
crop seems infatuated with cheeky stylisation, intellectual
promiscuity in subject matter and socio-political purview,
drawn to jazz and spectacle. But the threads of investigation
into illusion, a frank examination of the spiritual bankruptcy of
pop culture and an enchantment with the unimaginably pure
life of the natural world not only survives but thrives in their
hands. Shana Nys Dambrot
Portia Hein, Untitled, 2007,
oil on canvas, 122 x 91 cm.
courtesy LA Louver, Venice
Artreview 126
NEW Sept_REVIEWS.indd 12 7/8/07 15:47:36
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