Scott Grodesky @ SUNDAY

Scott Grodesky

Table

May 14th - June 14th 2009

SUNDAY

237 Eldridge St.

Lately I have been interested in seeking out art, particularly painting, that gives off alot more energy than it consumes or even speaks of -- or with.

In Scott Grodesky's latest exhibition, we are presented with a dwarf-epic of people in their domain on that very human scale. The pictures, the range of activity and subjects from the commonplace to the obscure here are rendered and analyzed aesthetically -- not intellectually -- by a sophisticated painter.

The artist is known for his intelligent and emotive play on certain conventions and imposed limitations of perspective and palette in creating a whole range of emotions and ideas through those formal 'tricks'. Often the paintings carry the feel of humanism: the family and depiction on an honest life and it's honest-yet-otherworldly-depiction, crafted through some seemingly unsophisticated gaze that is anything but.

Nothing new is the fact that there is quite a bit of faux-naive painting that gets made, and this doesn't qualify. The work is more akin to a Guston-like portrayal of reality where everything is so real and yet accomplished in caricature -- not in style but in emotion -- so that the full range of experience can actually BE seen.

In addition to Guston, consciously or not -- and in spirit or application -- the work fits into (and refers to) a strange lineage of 'questionable' artists with a range of interpretations and criticisms from hard line camps: J.J. Rousseau, Jacob Lawrence, Thomas Hart Benton, Pierre Bonnard, William T. Wiley, the Mexican muralists (Orozco), and the illustrations of Clement Hurd or Roald Dahl.

In the new exhibition, Table, there seems to be not only a progression in painting style but in the furnishing of these paintings. Often in the older works, perspective was placed behind the viewer rather than ahead, projecting us into the past rather than some anxiety of future. In the new paintings -- due to the painterly feng shui -- the future looks that much more bright, but only as seen through the current moment.

This sense of the incoherent led to some level of anxiety in the older works. It is is still present here, although downplayed and more prude, slightly tweaking the picture plane and creating that space of mild anxiety. Now its more a space to reflect on the present than some past or anxious future. A shift from dazed and confused to presence.

The works also depart from the last exhibition held at Zach Feuer in that it seems to have shifted from darker fairy-taled themes illuminated by pastel colors to lighter more close to home ones with: incredibly even-brighter palettes and closer intimate crops. The work really resonates on that level of intimacy in Sunday's more affectionate Lower East Side exhibition space. Here the works almost function in-situ, especially when viewed on a nice Spring day.

In this new work, everything takes the nature not of dreams but of a kind of hazed living-ecstasy seen through a an accomplished lens lathered with mayonnaise. In some ways, the paintings take on that 'soft' quality that Dali was interested in, also Oldenburg comes to mind where the reality seeps in through those softened 'real's.

In the main work, Table, 2008 spanning almost thirteen feet and hung at body height is a scene which encapsulates the vortex of possible activity that is a home. Going from experience from my own family, these surfaces become not the place of meals but the battleground of action figures, patina-ed by hardened residue of construction paste and chewing gum, and periodically the inaugural display place of various science fair projects.

The painting approach here is honed to the parameters of Goldilocks - just right - perspectival weirdness, while other projects such as Street Scene, 2009 and Mirror, 2008. create stoic vignettes onto old themes made anew and closer to home. Its almost impossible for me to describe these things further without reaching into my bag of verbal tricks, of which the artist makes unnecessary.

I left this active space feeling really good about painting and its possibility.

Table

2008
Acrylic & colored pencil on canvas
65x153"

Street Scene

2009
Acrylic & colored pencil on canvas
60x48"