The precarious balance of society and nature, and man’s place within the magnetism of both is the central theme of Stephen Seemayer’s “Dark Side of Paradise” at Bermudez Projects. The collection of 26 paintings and nine studies are an ode to the shadow self and the two inescapable authorities that aim to rule it—civilization and death.

While the works are paintings, they appear at a glance to be linocuts or etchings with repeating patterns of brushstrokes that are both a testament to patience and a mark of artisan technique. The brushstrokes add to the hypnotic sense of movement in the paintings. One work seems to lead into the other and it’s easy to imagine the paintings as a small glimpse into a larger world swirling around the reality we are in. In the painting Requiem 1 (2021), a figure appears to be the Pied Piper, hung upside down like the hanged man in a tarot deck, while a skeleton looms, with its hand reaching toward the figure. Seemayer repeatedly uses the same visual icons, while the dynamic swirling background creates a narrative structure for these archetypal symbols to exist within.

Stephen Seemayer, Illumination 8, 2022. Courtesy of the artist and Bermudez Projects, Los Angeles

This series of paintings, which were created during the pandemic, is markedly reminiscent of the works of Francisco de Goya—in both the hypnotic line work and the macabre existential subject matter. Seemayer is positioning himself, like de Goya, to be something of an archivist of human suffering, and while his subjects and architecture are of the Greco-Roman time period, the struggles and turmoil are clearly of this day and age. Over and over again, we see man upside down, twisted, confronting death and shattering towers of civilization. It seems that in Seemayer’s world, Rome is destined to fall.

Bermudez Projects
Stephen Seemayer: Dark Side of Paradise
1225 Cypress Ave.,
Los Angeles, CA 90065
On view through May 11, 2024