We have abandonment issues lately/forever – desolate, disconsolate and a bit fragile. In Henry Taylor’s painting, that fragility coexists with an incongruous durability – a hard thing that cracks against identity or classification or simply swallows it up. Taylor’s paintings for this show are hung above complementary settings: a field of quasi-adobe dust and dirt, broken only by a solitary, hacked-up tree, a water pump, and a painted-over wall of cinder block partially sheltering a tarp-covered tent and evidence of life fallen apart; and a blue vinyl ‘swimming pool’ centered within a green grass border (portraits of subjects at leisure). Backdrop, setting, landscape tend to rush (or fall) forward in Henry Taylor’s paintings. He’s described his style of portraiture as ‘landscape; and that holds true in this show of (mostly) painting and portraiture. It’s as if palette-knife thick swaths of pigment were pressed flat beneath glass or abraded or otherwise thinned into the sheerest strokes (e.g., the gesture of a leg or its covering) or dispersed into background or foreground. The portrait is a kind of identity tent for Taylor, the setting or landscape completes the subject or pulls it apart – or sometimes both at once.

Blum & Poe
2727 S. La Cienega Blvd.
Los Angeles, CA 90034
Show runs thru November 5, 2016