by Alex Wells
Each year Los Angeles turns or kind-of-turns its highly distractable eye toward the Frieze Los Angeles art fair to see what sophisticated culture looks like this go-round. And what it looks like—across a wide swath of medium and method—is burnt sienna.
Visitors to the Santa Monica Airport were once again treated to selections from over one hundred of the art world’s toniest art spaces, many of whom decided to show off an explosive variety of earth tones in painting, drawing, print, sculpture, and photography. The entire visual and symbolic vocabulary of browns was on display from ecological tree-trunk mahoganies to striking images of the African-American body (particularly female), to brunette and buff as signifiers of pre-industrial-era decoration to rich dark neutrals adding a touch of Steinway-piano classiness to otherwise tired or familiar styles. Does this new investment in Pop Art’s least favorite color signal a rejection of the plastic and the digital? An embrace of the traditional and sustainable? Or just a scramble for something we haven’t seen lately?
LA’s own Quinn Harrelson Gallery takes the coffee-colored crown with an installation by artist-activist Ser Serpas featuring both massive sepia figures but also a splayed assemblage of found furniture parts but many other gamely participated in showcasing nut-colored works including many gloomy and often-inexplicable abstractions, naturalistic backgrounds accompanying vibrant foregrounds, soothing folk art depictions of humble figures at work and play in more-or-less innocent landscapes and a large image of Chewbacca, Han Solo’s bearlike co-pilot from Star Wars.
To be sure, other avenues of expression were explored—including beaten silver and fleshy pastels—but the overall gist is away from digital imagery and toward nature and learned simplicity. I also note a tendency I fane would dub “The Subversive Decorative” which begins by nominally attempting to imitate some familiar ornamental gesture like wallpaper or still-life, but then leans into any failure of attention or skill with an expressionist gusto which introduces the artisan-cum-artist as a vector of alternate narratives. Only time can tell if it will last the year, or the decade.
IMAGE: Installation by artist-activist Ser Serpas.