Faris McReynolds March 15-April 26th, 2008 Reception: Saturday, March 15, 6-8PM
Goff + Rosenthal New York is pleased to announce an exhibition of new paintings by Los Angeles-based artist Faris McReynolds in what will be his first New York solo show.
Working from film stills and photographs extracted from mainstream media and popular culture, McReynolds’ paintings explore how the meaning of an image is broken down through dense layers of interpretation and appropriation: from film to video; video to digital media; from digital media to paint.
Depicting group activities such as party scenes, sunbathing, and showboat performances, McReynolds magnifies the contrast between the immediacy of spectacle and the slow reveal of an event’s details. With images that linger in the space between a document and the imagination, McReynolds bestows the mundane activities of our self-congratulating, shameless American culture with a sense of seduction, violence, intrigue and suspense.
Stylistically ranging from an expressionistic, palette-knife impasto to a more delicate watercolor, McReynolds’ work reflects a historically diverse range of influences including Bacon, Warhol, the Impressionists, wartime paintings, meat paintings, Richard Prince and Kurt Vonnegut. Using a loose narrative style and a seamless melding of assorted techniques, McReynolds immortalizes the fleeting and the minute in highly saturated and boldly contrasting colors.
McReynolds has said that his work “comes from the desire to find a balance between something that is staged and intuitive, original and reproduced, familiar and unexpected, digital and analog, comic and tragic…I’m drawn to moments that exist between genesis and resolve. Something so fleeting and anonymous it’s impossible to see without the aid of technology.”
Faris McReynolds received his BFA from Otis College of Art and Design in Los Angeles, California in 2000. He has exhibited world-wide, including a solo exhibition last year at Tim Van Laere Gallery in Antwerp, Belgium. In 2006, McReynolds had solo exhibitions at Roberts & Tilton in Los Angeles and Gallery Min Min in Tokyo. Additionally, McReynolds’ work has been featured in Details, Art Papers, Flash Art, Tema Celeste, Artweek and Art US.
