November 5, 2004
Two L.A. exhibitions
Artforum.com has posted the "Critics' Picks" fruits of my LA trip: brief reviews of Evan Holloway's "I Don't Exist" at marc foxx and Matthew Greene's "she who casts the darkest shadow on our dreams" at peres projects. It's only by coincidence that I reviewed shows at the two LA galleries who prefer lowercase renderings of their names. Here is the text from each review.
Evan Holloway:
Figuration, a latent thread that has run through Los Angeles-based Holloway's rather formalist practice for several years, is pushed to the fore in "I Don't Exist," his fifth hometown solo. Almost every sculpture in the exhibition combines multiple figures or faces, crudely rendered and physically inseparable from geometric armatures reminiscent of his earlier work. Equity, 2004, for example, is populated by twenty-seven small nude figurines, each skewered by thin metal rods, covered with brown paint, to form a three-layer latticework cube. Relationships between figure and pure form are bolstered by human interaction in Anti Hierarchy, 2004, an eleven-foot ring suspended from the ceiling whose interior Holloway has lined with over a hundred faces, in varying hues, cast from synthetic plaster. Staring straight ahead, each gaze meets its match in the center of the loop, and the work implies a parenthetical subtitle to the exhibition: "I Don't Exist (Except in Relation to Others)". Even Cherubino, 2004, one of two fully abstract works on view, has its contingencies: its looping plaster form would disintegrate without the support of the steel base it rests on. Holloway has long encouraged an informal interdependency between object and viewer—usually by rewarding assiduous looking with surprising details—but these recent works encode that dependency in the sculptures themselves, and this show's tensions are perfectly poised.
Matthew Greene:
In his solo debut, Matthew Greene outlines the contours of a world devoid of hierarchy and false dichotomies, populated by an idiosyncratic amalgam of mushrooms and redwoods, guitars and Marshall amps, and armies of louche figures (often hermaphrodites) based on 1970s-era pornographic magazines. His landscape paintings, as large as twelve by ten feet, and black ink drawings, as small as seven inches square, are sensoriums skeptical of an Enlightenment conception of logic, developing instead by the nonlinear momentum of highly adaptable plants and animals. Regression is not inimical to progress, as it can reverse erroneous steps already taken, and Greene's paintings often look far back into history; 19th century Symbolism is only a way station (albeit an important one) for an artist whose sources stretch all the way to Stonehenge. How to see that far back and encompass such vast swaths of knowledge? Perhaps by use of a psychedelic gaze, alluded to by blushes of pink, green, blue, and orange peeking through his wide washes of black, and accessible via the heavy music referenced by his titles and the hallucinogenic fungi depicted. It takes a visionary's confidence to scrutinize, through painting, big subjects like gender, sexuality, how we come to possess knowledge, and how we measure time, yet in each work Greene does so convincingly. As the space of his paintings recedes before us, it is awfully tempting to try and step across the divide.
Both are now archived at BrianSholis.com: Holloway and Greene. I also added the Spencer Finch text from last week.