reviewS sean LanDers
Sean LanderS
China art ObjeCts, LOs angeLes
8 september – 20 OCtOber
Huffer Gold Metallic, 2007, oil on Linen,
137 x 137 cm. Courtesy the artist and China
art Objects, Los angeles
Sean Landers continues to impress and depress us with his commitment to neurological delirium that can accompany a huffer’s bad trip, a terrifying
modes of self-degradation. Two large portraits depict so-called huffers, or distortion takes place. Shut within himself, the drug addict appears in a
solvent abusers, painted from mugshots of two hapless men literally ‘caught humiliating stupor alongside the weirdly hallucinatory cartoons as another
with their paint on’ – Huffer Blue Metallic and Huffer Gold Metallic (all works in the growing cast of bumbling and barely together characters. In his
2007). Stunned and demoralised by their exposure to statutory reality, previous Los Angeles exhibition of paintings, Landers depicted a number
their faces are smothered around the nose and mouth with the blue and of American showbiz comedians and performers, also from the 1960s
gold paint that, respectively, they were sniffing. The huffers are placed in and 70s, who specialised in canny and sharp-witted, yet self-deprecating,
conversation with three parallel portraits of Hanna-Barbera cartoon losers buffoonery. Their tragicomic approach to provocation is again his subject
from the 1960s and 70s, who seem to have stumbled out of the boozy adult here, the pairing of cartoon with waste-oid operating as a self-critical artistic
showbiz culture of the time. All possess a generous dose of drunken pathos strategy.
and misfit credentials: Quick Draw McGraw has apparently just shot his Landers paints the huffer as having repurposed paint for its chemical
pistol off in his own face and is wearing an astonished expression, his muzzle toxicity and solvency. Taking paint as a drug performs painting as something
coated in black powder, his cowboy hat tattered and smoking. Buford the that fucks you up, dissolving sober reality and probably causing lasting
goofy purple bloodhound races along on his bicycle with a dopey face brain damage. He suggestively merges the artist and huffer along the
and ears flapping. And Casper’s Uncle (2007), of the ghost creed, coasts lines of their common pursuit of euphoric and transformative possibilities,
through the painting’s space with his body pitched forward, his big red nose chasing a precarious high whose two-sided nature flirts dangerously with
and droopy bloodshot eyes leading the way. The last two are each centred self-negation and social alienation. The huffer’s striving for transcendence,
over textual underpaintings that invoke the language of psychoanalysis in however high the cost, resonates with the pitiable artist’s restless need for
reference to substance abuse, both its delusions and the recovery from it. self-realisation and public celebrity. Empathy just barely redeems their
The playful, childish humour supposedly inherent in cartoons (and manic desperation from pure horror, allowing us to see it instead as the
clowns, as alluded to by the huffers’ facepaint) is countered with nervous failed promise of deliverance from our too often doleful and dysphoric
desolation and morbidity. By linking the trio of cartoon characters to the world. Eli Langer & Sarah Lehrer-Graiwer
131 artreview
December_REVIEWS.indd 131 2/11/07 12:16:12
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