[ad_1]
Erik Parker’s new exhibition at Veta Galeria, Excessive Hopes, brings collectively tondos, portraits and pyramids, the place totally different strategies are mixed, however Parker’s recognizable pictorial type is all the time preserved. On the one hand, exuberant landscapes of an virtually alien exoticism are proven, suggesting a whimsical escape from actuality. This sensation is strengthened by the round format of the work, whose vegetation frames and concentrates the viewer’s standpoint, turning the customer right into a type of explorer observing distant lands by way of a spyglass.
The portraits present figures made up of a mess of components, within the method of a “trendy Arcimboldo”, as Jeff Gibson has described him. In them, a brand new biology flows round constructions shaped by texts, photos and references to well-liked tradition, in what could be learn as an correct and significant up to date portrait. And eventually, within the pyramids, that very same aesthetic method is organized in a stratified geometry. This admits readings as disparate because the sacred, the conspiratorial, the legendary, the hierarchical, and even deception and disillusionment in its resemblance to Ponzi schemes.
Influenced by Rousseau, Basquiat and the Chicago Imagists, but in addition by Carrol Dunham and Peter Saul, whose pupil he was, Parker has developed a really distinctive pictorial vocabulary. With a everlasting and choose musical thread within the studio, Parker works situating himself with one foot planted deep within the Nineteen Seventies, whereas with the opposite he gropes and scrambles within the current, providing it to us, paradoxically, with a recent and pertinent crispness. “The concept,” Parker says, “is to take one thing acquainted and make it unusual.” Generic archival images, discovered on the internet, are projected onto canvas and reinvented in paint. Journal clippings from the Nineteen Seventies, when the standard of the paper was increased exactly as a result of there was no web, are mixed with hanging phrases written in retro typefaces. Aesthetic nostalgia is knotted with well-liked tradition, whereas a connection is established between hippie psychedelia and potential mutant vegetable futures to dream about or retreat to. Nice hopes, pissed off or renewed, come collectively in an amalgam the place to get misplaced with the look, and that’s undeniably acquainted, on the similar time completely unusual, and subsequently extraordinarily attention-grabbing.
[ad_2]
