I was asked recently to give a talk about my work so I spent some time digging out old treasures and photographing them today. These works from around 2002 - 2004 are from just before I went to grad school. 

Back then I was very comfortable being a "student of a student" of the New York post-ab-ex figurative school, painters that called themselves (or were called by others more likely) the 10th Street painters. Louisa Mathiasdottoir, Leland Bell, Rosemarie Beck, etc, many of whom are in this curious show at Schroeder Romero & Shredder: http://srandsgallery.com/index.php?/exhibitions/spring_summer_fall_winter 

As a student I was, and still am a fan of Jean Helion, a man who participated in the development of early modernist French abstraction in the late 1930's. Shortly after he made some very impressive machinist abstractions he went off to fight in WWII. The war ended and bits and pieces of European culture went their way. Many art and culture producers made their way back into the fabric of life that existed before the war. Much like Andre Derain after the first world war, post-WWII Helion rejected modernism in his own way (I should say reacted to modernism in his own way, because neither Derain or Helion fully rejected modernism). However, unlike Derain's conservatism Helion's return to the figure, and to urban and suburban French culture (he painted a lot of flea markets) is marked by fierce color, and prescient juxtapositions of ideas and images.

He clearly saw the absurdity of post war Parisian life in this painting from the early 50's. So strange that this man should be napping in front of a store called "golden". Is it some golden slumber, is he homeless? Was he drunk last night and now at 7 am about to wake to the cruel fate of hobbling home with only one shoe, aided by an umbrella? In most every instance it doesn't really matter, the painting makes it's own kind of sense. 


One of the reasons I admire Helion as an artist is his stylistic gear shifts, his chameleon like investigation into how to paint. It's almost as if every decade or so he got bored and decided to test his audience by switching styles. There's no transition period between painting loosely stylized figures to wildly colored street scenes to 10 years of intensely realized, highly detailed studio interiors. My inability to understand and come to terms with his motivations for this keep me invested in his weird flat footed alchemy.

This table of leftover junk, which became a motif of his in the early 70's, is maybe one of the best commentaries on late industrial culture by a French painter of the period. It's a cloud of discarded hand-me-downs, probably collected on a studio table and char. Spatially the objects sit together somewhere, but where? In some grey-green funk, to look means to have to pass through electric pink miasma. Despite his aesthericization of the abject I can't help but see some connection to the work of American artist Mike Kelley, who made work about the discarded and ignored parts of his particular culture beginning just a decade hence. 

Which is maybe a reminder that our culture will be defined (if anyone is around to define it) as much by our trash as by our treasures. Some anthropologist will come along and theorize on our own lives, pick through our trash, measure our bones and write theses about her findings. Helion's reputation, as far as I can tell, is far beyond the cultural trash can, it's undeservedly buried deep in a dump.
 

Speaking of anthropology and culture, I have a really great, well illustrated book on Helion that I can't read because it's written in French and I understand very little of that language I once studied in High-School. Thankfully there's lots of pictures to look at.

Spring, Summer, Winter, Fall runs from 16 February to 21 April, 2012 at Schroeder Romero &Shredder