Michael Benevento‘s website is devoid of a bio for Anthony Burdin, a reclusive artist whose work is as intriguing and enigmatic as his mysterious persona. Untitled, Burdin’s show encompasses works from 1992-2018 in a wide array of media. Each of Benevento’s four connected galleries is curated almost as a show of its own, with every room evoking a feeling distinct from the others. Most haunting is Gallery 2, where Blupsych Portal Pond (2018), an aqueous indigo video projection, wavers like a rectangular pool in the center of the floor, surrounded by walls dotted with dreamlike C-prints of artificial lights blurred into vibrant wavy squiggles against dark backgrounds. Spotlighted in the dimmed gallery, these framed pictures (example above) confer an eerie reverence upon the photographic trope of taking a picture while moving one’s camera amid artificial lights at night. This installation’s elegance is a far cry from a separate room containing works such as Ed Ruscha’s Dad (1992), where Burdin’s crude, whimsical doodles upon reproductions of famous paintings sport a playfully irreverent Dada-esque vision of art history. Another painting series consists of multi-layered expressionistic abstractions bearing painterly passages, frenetic squiggles, scratches, sgraffiti, and collaged ephemera including playing cards and notebook pages. Burdin’s strange, multifarious art seems to incarnate a frenzied determination to transmute mundanity into mystery.

Michael Benevento
3712 Beverly Blvd.
Los Angeles, CA 90004
Show runs through Jan. 26