Interview

This year I liked the drawings with poetry of a young artist named Barry Johnston at Overduin & Kite, a smart young gallery from Los Angeles.  We haven't seen much good poetry in a good picture since Rene Ricard. New York's ATM Gallery exhibited some really strong paintings by a cat who's big in Japan, Tomoo Gokita, who's sort of the Fernand Leger of black and white. He seems to be wrapping up the history of modernism, from surrealism to abstract expressionism, in a striking monochromatic (or is it achromatic?) package.

Kim Light Gallery featured Case Simmons and Andrew Burke, whose work is collage by computer, but which transcends that tool in achieving results that would have wowed them back in the Summer of Love. Their highly detailed assemblages of clipped magazine art and the like are big and enormously detailed in that sort of Haight-Ashbury/Hieronymus Bosch mode that appeals to those under the influence of psychedelics, but can also be entertaining to those of us attempting to navigate the planet by logical and conventionally intuitive means. There is a nice humor to their cosmically-constructed mandalas and Eastern-tinged pop pantheons that recalls the great painter Mati Klarwein who did those Miles Davis and Santana album covers.

Simmons and Burke, Temple 7, 2007, Courtesy of Kim Light Galley; Crop of Mati Klarwein's Anunciation from the cover of Santana's Abraxas

One nice feature of NADA is that you'll find artists from places that are a bit off the beaten art path. Like Ireland. Last year I bought a little painting at the booth of Mother's Tank Station. An almost tiny painting actually, which is a good size when you live in an apartment and the art world is filled with painters determined to make pictures for museums and/or the McMansions one finds in such places as the former potato fields of the Hamptons. How much longer can I wait for that Schnabel miniature? Anyway, the small painting I bought was from Atsushi Kaga, a young Japanese artist who lives in Dublin and seems to like the pub life as well as the herb favored by followers of Sellassie. His oeuvre is a sort of continuous comic strip featuring a cast of anime-style animals, particularly two friends, a bunny named Usacchi and a bear named Kamacchi who's an amputee on crutches. These two are always in philosophical conversation, and so many of these paintings come the way I like ‘em-with dialogue. In the painting I bought, Kumacchi dunks a basketball standing on the shoulders of Usacchi, who stands on the back of a fellow in a masked marvel/batman kind of costume.  Nothing needs to be said here. Usually I can't tolerate anime or manga, but this work has such a refined sensibility that it's simultaneously tender, philosophical and hilarious. I was pleased to see that the saga of the bear and the bunny has continued nicely. Usacchi has sprouted flowers from his ears. One of the nicest of Kaga's new painting is a sort of bunny with still life entitled: "I always have flowers for you in my head."

Atsushi Kaga, Usacchi and Kumacchi in July, 2008. Courtesy of Mother's Tank Station

A recent trip proved to me that Dublin is a terrific place for an artist to work now, and Mother's Tankstation has several painters (Kaga not among them,) working in a sort of flat, muted, post-Alex Katz style that is interesting in the lowness of its key.

A French dealer, Galerie Chez Valentin, had a piece I really wanted to buy-a pink resin sculpture exactly shaped like the classic Sony portable television, by Eric Baudart. I had to keep saying, "Pay for the pool, pay for the pool," to restrain myself. Shane Campbell Gallery from Chicago had amusing works in charcoal on paper and oil on linen, from Jonas Wood, a Los Angels-based artist. The best were ancient Greek ceramics funkily drawn in black and white, complete with their B.C. dates. If the Greeks take everything back we'll still have these.
 
At NADA the dealers tend to be very friendly, eager to talk about their artists and not too heavy on the sales pitch-and some of them are cute-but Mihai Nicodim was not that engaging. I assume that the person bearing that name was the rather gruff fellow sitting there. Maybe I caught him on a bad day. But I really liked some of the painters he was showing. Serban Savu, a thirty-year-old Romanian, makes soft-focus oil paintings that mostly show people working in rather humdrum occupations, baking, fishing, driving, but in a very dreamy atmosphere. They are very strong paintings, beautifully composed and with the courage to be quiet and reflective. This gallery also showed some very beautiful paintings of beekeepers working and rather fantastic landscapes. I think the artist's name is John Stark but the gallerist scared me off. Next time I'm in L.A. I'll going to work up the nerve to visit the gallery.