Artillery Magazine

Tag: recycled art

  • Kenny Scharf

    Kenny Scharf

    Few artists crisscross high-low categories as deftly as Kenny Scharf, whose whimsical work inhabits a gallery as strikingly as it does a street. Just down the road from his tire-shop mural, the exterior of Honor Fraser is currently festooned in a tacky crown of plastic toys that dangle menacingly over your head as you the enter the threshold. Inside, assorted large-scale paintings demand a certain degree of earnest consideration while provoking laughter for the brash goofiness of their colorful casts of amorphous characters. Smeared with cosmic orbs and abstract squiggles, a dingy couch and a quartet of once-elegant chairs testify to the fact that no item, however mundane, is immune to having its surface stormed by Scharf’s razzle-dazzle brushwork. The backs of two TV sets are transformed into grinning buck-toothed aliens. Just beyond, green houseplants spill from ceramic flowerpots doubling as portraits of monsters and Fred Flintstone. Amassed from trinkets and toys disgorged from the past, several plastic assemblages evoke the ravenousness of a society perpetually grasping at throwaway baubles. Yet Scharf’s prolific recycling of objects, styles and characters playfully suggests that cultural castoffs can be salvaged and transfigured as easily as they were discarded.

     

    Honor Fraser Gallery
    2622 S. La Cienega Blvd.
    Los Angeles, CA 90034
    Show runs through Nov. 16

  • Cristian Răduță

    Cristian Răduță

    “The Diamond Hunters,” Cristian Răduță‘s installation at Nicodim Gallery, places you in the midst of an army of animals cobbled from oddments. The Romanian artist’s menagerie of untitled 2019 sculptures encompasses myriad species fashioned from spray-painted wood, cardboard, mirrored garden balls, foam, duct tape, mops, toilet plungers, and various other less-recognizable substances. Just about any stripe of creature one might imagine is present, animatedly posed yet immobile like a taxidermy. A purple gorilla of rough old wood lumbers toward an avian with an absurdly large shiny yellow beak and long ski-like feet; a striped snake with strange wing-like protuberances sticks playfully out of the wall; a silvery chameleon hangs from a rafter, dripping its rope tongue over the floor in a knot entangling a ballpoint pen. Despite their playful affectation, Răduță’s bestial bricolages are more humanly bizarre than garden-variety toys, often bearing blatantly anthropomorphic or monstrous features. A sinking feeling develops as you realize that your surrounding rascals are not innocuous creatures, but chimerical freaks. Moreover, their tactical configuration seems confrontational, overwhelming as in a nightmare. Yet upon closer examination, individuals appear melancholy. Many are pained or impaled by bodily infringements such as plastic water bottles, pipes, or tools; while others are personified as though engaged in activities such as painting or drinking from straws. Răduță’s recycled mutants poignantly express the hidden horrors of our throwaway society’s perpetual undermining of other species. Are they the problem, or are we?

     

    Nicodim Gallery
    571 S. Anderson St., Ste. 2
    Los Angeles, CA  90033
    Show runs through Apr. 13