Tainted @ the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver (Eduardo Sarabia)
Yo dawg, I heard you like paint. Both as a historical means of representation and also as a pure material with its own implicit aesthetics. Additionally, it has come to my attention that you enjoy vernacular photography. So I put some photos in your paint and some paint in your photos, so that you can contemplate figure/ground, medium/message, and presentation/representation relationships while you look at these paintings of photos (of paint on photos).
First impression: maybe this kind of thing has been done before?
But! The big blobs, in addition to being something of an intellectual hall of mirrors, are also flowers blooming out of a girl’s obscured face. And wadded-up chewing gum, and vandalism, and a sea breeze. They transform within the photographs’ contexts, and act within them; these pictures work your gut as well as your brain. They speak of hot days, suburban vacations, beauty, adolescence, banality, and the smell of spring.
The colors are pretty and smart. They’re caricatures—exaggerated echoes—the difference between what we think and what we see. The grass, greener; the flesh too pink. The sea falsely sea foam green.
Up close the layers collapse; all there is is a single, thin, and uniform layer of merely actual oils.