by Julian White
The exhibition of Daniel Dove’s paintings at Philip Martin would fit right into any early-modernist home, and that is entirely the point and, really, the only point.
This is contemporary art that has fully devolved with maximum efficiency down the scale of capitalist selection into total full-on cock-sucking boot-licking no-idea-included neo-Fascist home decor. These pictures were made, in every sense, to take whatever was going on in the windows, grottoes and chairs of your wealthy midcentury home and repeat it inside the rectangles with which you will besmear its walls.
The images themselves are eye-rollingly familiar forms of roughly Jean Arp vintage emerging like imaginary sculpture from standard-issue surrealist cityscapes, landscapes and dreamscapes. The paintings use comfy, common grandma-modernist, pre-Pop color schemes of burnt orange, mustard yellow and exhausted teal, effectively evoking all the dustiest and least original ideas from the earliest 20th Century European attempts to remake the visual world from a tabula rasa.
To be as fair as it is possible to be, there is here a hint of a shadow of a whiff of an intimation that Dove might be able to offer a bit more than mere reheated retro for a daring Los Feliz housewife’s palatial shag-rug sitting room. The shapes themselves are slabs (hence the exhibition name “Slab Citizen”) with strong, angular lighting added to provide a would-be sinister element. Hard-line shadows combined with a painting technique that seems to scrape away some of the rendered paint provides a dystopian and dilapidating view of the well-worn aesthetic.
With a little more imagination than Dove has, one could picture the mash-up of sculpture, architecture and landscape forms all combined on a decaying film set out in the middle of Palm Springs somewhere: a post-apocalyptic post-modernity in the sense that a picturesquely decaying Brutalist factory out in Detroit might be.
But there just isn’t enough to fuel the fantasy. I overheard the gallerist describing the artist’s process to another gallery visitor, and the (gobsmackingly stupid) idea was to take photos of simple shapes and then feed that into an AI, which would then generate a form that the artist would then 3D print and paint from. If I misheard, I apologize, but if true, it explains everything tired and tiresome about these images. They are painted reconstructions of computer reconstructions of shapes echoing a vanished vibe and the only attempt at originality is the entirely unoriginal idea of injecting dark intimations of how unoriginal it all is.
I’m sure someone somewhere thinks this is as good as we can hope for in these fallen times, but I’ve seen toenail clippings more interesting.
Image: Courtesy Philip Martin Gallery