FOUR PAINTERS GIVING THE ART WORLD A FRESH COAT
Painters today face the challenge of offering their unique voices by means of a traditional medium. Four artists are invigorating painting with works that utilise tradition toward innovation, pushing canvases and audiences into exciting new territory.
Jannis Varelas
Jannis Varelas fashions large-scale canvases into colourful abstract works that burst with movement. The Greek artist paintings have been shown at James Fuentes Gallery, New York, The Breeder gallery, Athens and Frieze New York and are inspired by the expressive drawings of young people with ADHD. Varelas seeks to channel a similar automatic raw creativity in his studios in Athens, Los Angeles, and Vienna. He frequently merges patches of primary-coloured oil paint with imagery and scratchings reminiscent of the kind of illustrations made by children. As more and more artists move through art school, Varelas explains, exploring one’s art through the process of playful unsophistication is more important than ever. Varelas reinvigorates the in-your-face ignorant impact of artists that precede him, painting with a simultaneously frenzied and innocent energy. His canvases are rich with imagination bound to inspire painters to come.
Jannis Varelas - ABC Flag, 2015, guesso, oil, oilstick, acrylic, permanent marker on canvas, 210 x 210 cm. Image courtesy The Breeder.
Jannis Varelas - Cowboy, 2016, mixed media on canvas, 300 x 300 cm. Image courtesy The Breeder.
Jonathan Chapline
Jonathan Chapline is from Waco, Texas and works currently in Brooklyn, New York. Being the youngest artist of the four—30 years old—his works are arguably the most stylistically cutting-edge. Though he employs traditional oil painting technique, he uses those analogue skills to depict still life and domestic settings of various sizes as though they were digitally rendered. To do this, Chapline starts with a bright background that imparts his paintings with a cool glow similar to that of a cell phone. He then fashions blocky forms to resemble early computer graphics by giving them sharp edges overstated with stark shadows. Taking the kind of imagery that might strike most as mundane, perhaps even crude, he is able to transform it into scenes saturated as much with colour as with sultry mood. Chapline’s tromp l’oeil have been on view at The Hole, New York, Victori + Mo, Brooklyn, and BEERS London. With impeccable composition and colour, the artist’s moonlit quasi-realism holds fascination for viewers coming from either side of the digital age.
Jonathan Chapline - Constructed Objects on a Flat Plane III 2017. Acrylic on panel, 23.5 x 30 in. Image courtesy Jonathan Chapline.
Jonathan Chapline - Woman II 2017. Acrylic and flashe on panel, 47 x 60 in. Image courtesy Jonathan Chapline.
Monica Kim Garza
Born in Alamogordo, New Mexico, Monica Kim Garza now lives in Atlanta, Georgia and at just 28 years old, the artists vibrant painted fantasies are uniquely hers. Embodying a rare sense of energy and freedom, Monica’s brush is loose, gestural and urgent. Much like her women; carefree, empowered and unapologetically themselves. The daughter of immigrant parents of Korean and Mexican descent, Garza paints many versions of herself firmly rooted in art historian motifs and settings; on horse-back, in her studio and her bedroom, snatching the female form back from the rigid tropes of art history. Garza works closely with V1 Gallery in Copenhagen.
Monica Kim Garza, The Painters’ Club, 2017, acrylic, embroidery thread, plastic, wood on paper, 61x46cm. Courtesy of V1 Gallery
Monica Kim Garza, Smoke when I drank, I drank when I smoke, 2017, acrylic, embroidery thread, wool, oil pastel on paper, 61x46cm. Courtesy of V1 Gallery
Monica Kim Garza, Uno, Dos, 2016, acrylic and oil pastel on canvas, 92x122cm. Courtesy of V1 Gallery
Thrush Holmes
Toronto-based artist Thrush Holmes is best known for his audacious style, often incorporating neon lights over rudimental multimedia still lifes. At 38 years old, he has landed 10 international solo exhibitions in the past 5 years, recently showing with BEERS London. After closing his large public studio Thrush Holmes Empire in 2011, Holmes now works privately on his always sizeable, illuminated canvases. The attitude of sweeping lines exaggerated by the blaze of neon produces an alluring dissonance that has become the artist’s signature. Combining saturated palettes in oil, spray paint, collage, and more along with a Naïve experimental approach make for unabashedly textural experiences reflecting, as Holmes describes, his “affection for mistakes and failure.”
Thrush Holmes - Serious Painting (2017). Oil, gel medium, neon on canvas with artist's frame, 60 x 48 inches. Image courtesy Thrush Holmes.
Thrush Holmes - Motherfucking Moon Painting (2017). Oil, gel medium, neon on canvas with artist's frame, 60 x 48 inches. Image courtesy Thrush Holmes.
Words by Michelle Costanza