Stephen Aldahl’s current solo exhibition, “Cool Intentions,” is as pictorially generous as it is emotionally taciturn. His paintings, layered compositions using photo transfer, decals, text, and collage, do equal amounts to reveal as they do to hide. Engaging in a vocabulary of West Coast assemblage artists, the thickly constructed and multi-layered paintings reveal a well-considered fraction of the reference in use in Aldahl’s archive of imagery.

Left: One Too Many Mornings. Oil, acrylic, graphite and collage on linen, 47.24″ x 70.87.”
Right: Over the Influence. Oil, acrylic, enamel, graphite and appliqué on linen, 47.24″ x 70.87.”

As perpetually tongue-in-cheek as its’ referential title would lead one to believe, “Cool Intentions” functions as a meeting place between irony and sincerity. We follow his lettering (a knowing gesture toward graphic design and the language of fonts) like code, trying to decipher whether Aldahl’s lines are hyperbolically nihilistic indulgences or new age mantras. The answer is, likely, both. Hot & Empty, Happy & Dependent, Dazed & Confused — pick your player. A personal favorite ‘loneliness/emptiness/no happiness/just sadness’ in minute script, above the transferred photograph of Blair Waldorf (in this image she is not Leighton Meester, the actress who plays the Gossip Girl character, but the princess of the Upper East Side in all her headband-adorned glory) where our collective suffering becomes conflated with Waldorf’s and is at once wildly funny and immensely serious.

Stephen Aldahl, INTP. Oil, acrylic, graphite, appliqué and sheet mask on linen, 26.62″ x 35.43.”

Aldahl deftly traverses this in-between ground, entitling one painting INTP (Introverted, Intuitive, Thinking, Perceiving), a reference to his Myers-Briggs personality type, invoking notions of twenty-first century vanity associated with the increased popularity in psychological ‘types’ or horoscopes, all the while inviting you to consider your own “type.” It is no accident that his signature “face-masks” (the sheet ones used to beautify the face) are indiscreetly painted into this same piece. (My Myers-Briggs type is ENFJ, by the way).

There is a certain sense of lingering in this body of work, an erasure of sorts where one has the distinct feeling of omission. Likely this is due to the mounds of visual lexicon that has been gestured over. Included and yet removed. The fixation on portals – doorways and eyes – tease at entrée into this “Cool” exhibition, whose “intentions” have been resolved.

Stephen Aldahl lives and works in Los Angeles. Recent solo exhibitions include “Realistic Art” at Hot Wheels, Athens (2019) and “New Realization” at Young Art, Los Angeles (2016).

“Cool Intentions” is on view at Le Maximum, the art gallery opened by Liam Considine and Night + Market chef and owner Kris Yenbamroong, by appointment through February 6th, 2021.