Jonathan Griffin

Criticism and essays on art and culture

Month: July, 2013

July 17, 2013

Charles Garabedian

LA Louver Gallery, Los Angeles

Charles-Garabedian_Blue-Lipstick-CG13-16_14

There is a painting in Charles Garabedian’s current exhibition at LA Louver titled Beauty (2013). It is one of the ugliest works in the show – and it has some stiff competition. Blue Lipstick (2013), for instance, portrays the cyanotic features of a person of indeterminate gender who appears to have been recently chewing on an ink cartridge. Giotto’s Tree (2012) shows an ungainly woman with big legs and no arms (literally – no arms!) entangled in the branches of a sapling. Read the rest of this entry »

July 9, 2013

John Divola

John Divola Dark Star 2008

John Divola, from the ‘Dark Star’ series, 2008

In the distance, a soaring elevated freeway intersection frames a widescreen view of the San Gabriel mountains. The dissonance is typical of Southern California: awesome nature matched by equally awesome urban development. Despite the seemingly endless sprawl, it is rare in the Los Angeles basin that one cannot see out of it to the wilderness beyond.

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