ART CITIES:Los Angeles-John Armleder
John Armleder consistently rewires presumptions about what art can be in the wake of the modernist and postmodernist revolutions of the last century. His early association with the Fluxus movement has provided the springboard for an ever-evolving array of projects and conceptual approaches each of which leaves room for the operation of chance and the eruption of humor and pathos alike.
By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: David Kordansky Gallery Archive
Featuring paintings of several different kinds, as well as wall-mounted mirror objects and installation-based elements the exhibition “Sh/Ash/Lash/Splash” highlights John Armleder’s solo use of painting as a playfully experimental vehicle for posing questions, provocations, and aesthetic quandaries. Armleder’s exhibition is organized around a central motif, a stylized splash of paint that is found in several different kinds of works, rendered in several different materials. Splashes and puddles have been defining characteristics of many of the paintings the artist has made over the last few years, so that this sharp-edged, graphic iteration alludes to a significant portion of his recent work, one in which he detaches the idea of the action-based splatter from the movement of the hand, undermining preconceptions about authenticity and the subjectivity of the heroic individual artist. Even when it comes to the paintings with “actual” splatters and pours he proceeds less with specific compositional ideas in mind than with a curiosity about the interactions between different materials. In his “Puddle Paintings”, for instance, he often combines large quantities of paints made from contraindicated mediums that react in unpredictable ways, and throws glitter, toys into the still-wet puddles that accumulate. As they dry, visual and sculptural incidents emerge out of what seems like the materials’ own volition, exceeding the artist’s intention and placing him, like any other viewer, in a position where he can stand back and observe formal relationships between textures and colors. Armleder’s “Pour Paintings” meanwhile, focus attention on the movement of paint across the canvas as it is thrown. In each he privileges sweeping, calligraphic arcs (complete with the drips that fall from them), channeling the energies of abstract expressionism and action painting. In the exhibition he includes examples of the “Pour Paintings” that have also been emblazoned with a stenciled splatter. Symbol overlays gesture, and two seemingly competing ways of including a splatter in an artwork exist side-by-side, as if prodding one another into states of mutual admiration and skepticism. The splatter threatens to break entirely free of its relationship to painted abstraction in a series of new wall-based mirror sculptures, each of which shares the same silhouette. Fabricated in mirrored glass in a variety of colors and in two sizes, these objects exemplify Armleder’s propensity for engaging viewer participation in implied and literal ways, as well as his tendency to activate the spaces in which his artworks appear. The mirrors not only reflect the other artworks in the show and the bodies of the viewers before them; they allow for perspectives in which the exhibition as a whole appears inside the shape of a splatter, so that this caricature of a specific kind of painting also becomes an optical container for other kinds of artmaking strategies. These approaches include two paintings, each titled “Suit” in which the splatter has simply been screened onto a canvas, where it stands on its own like an emblem or aesthetic coat of arms. These works are reminders that Armleder’s art is as straightforward as it is complex, and that what you see really is often what you get.
Info: David Kordansky Gallery, 5130 W. Edgewood Pl., Los Angeles, Duration: 27/6-24/8/19, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, www.davidkordanskygallery.com
