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Moist Gilding
Western Project, Los Angeles, CA 2013
painting, drawing, sculpture, performance
[CLICK HERE to view exhibition performance]
The blood-tinged and honey-dipped mixed
media paintings, drawings, and sculptures
by Aaron Sheppard at Western Project offer
a genteel Mannerism exploded by scale and
turned out in a riot of tertiary color,
transgressive eroticism and gestural anat-
omy. Every bit of dripped, washed, split,
spliced, ecstatically eviscerated and
slathered-on pigment, ink, and deeply carved
wood consorts to depict people and objects
in scenes from Greek mythology and subse-
quent art-historical allegories rooted in
it. That Sheppard takes iterations of class-
icism as a stylistic as well as conceptual
starting point is asserted straight off by
the elaborate and integrated frames. Their
aggressively ornate character suggests the
fancy museum as confidently as a stage set,
so that their Rococo excesses affirmatively
function on a narrative level as well as a
formal one. Art history is used here as a
case study for cognitively accepting the
chaotic simultaneity of paradoxical life ex-
periences, expressive of the messy exuber-
ance of memory and desire. As observed by
Sheppard's spirit-guide, the incendiary
philosopher Georges Bataille, "The need to
go astray, to be destroyed, is an extremely
private, distant, passionate, turbulent
truth." And Sheppard sincerely recommends
going astray.
An operatic, gender-bending, elegant, un-
settling, fanciful anarchy is expressed in
both the style and the stuff of which the
work is made--acrylic, oil, neon, fabric,
pen, paper, wood, foam, wire, thread, spray
paint, photo-collage, marker, gold leaf, most
or all of which appears in every work to some
degree. In the masterpiece Salmacian Looking-
Glass (2013), bodies stop and start, sex parts
co-nullify and intermingle, and saliently, no
distinguishment is made between either self
and other, or between dreaming and waking, yet
the work's stance on the side of beauty holds
firm. Along with Psyche the goddess of the
soul, who stars in several pieces, the Mermaid
(which also recurs, and is especially powerful
in a sculpture that looks like a Will Cotton
painting which got the daylights beaten out of
it) is a touchstone for the broader subtext.
The Mermaid is inherently paradoxical as a
matter of science, and both desired and feared
as a matter of psychology. Like so much else in
art and literature and society, she is product
of male fantasy and an aspect of "dangerous"
female power, a signifier of magic, myth, dis-
covery, fear and longing, reality, perception,
and sex, sex, sex. Gorgeous and violent, she
is a psychosexual archetype that crosses
borders of culture, geography, language,
style, era and art--just like these ineffable
paintings.
-shana nys dambrot
art ltd.
Nov/Dec 2013 |
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Salmacian Looking-Glass, 2013
painting: oil, acrylic, charcoal on canvas; oil, spray paint, gold leaf on wood carved
frame; resin, silicon eggs
123 1/2 x 220 x 24 inches
chaise: oil, acrylic on canvas; upholstery; spray paint, gold leaf on wood carving; wax
candle; fringe
93 x 50 x 30 inches
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