The current exhibition on display at Marc Foxx Gallery in Los Angeles is a show of fifteen recently completed works by Belgian artist, Cris Brodahl. Walk into the gallery and you are immediately impacted by the odor of Black Forest wood, a strange sensation for a white cube gallery. The odoriferous effect is due to hinged doors with large wooden, Bauhaus-like hinges that do the job of either displaying, expanding, partitioning or concealing various works in the exhibition. The main gallery is overseen by a large painting,The Yellow Tree, the namesake of the entire installation.
The works are characteristically iconic and religious. These paintings are appealing because of their peculiar combination of conservative realism, apparently authentically felt religious themes along with surreal and dadaist and even formalist considerations that move the work towards a contemporary position of reification, irony and objectification. Though these works are rendered with a realist's painting sensibility, the painting breaks up in places and takes the viewer to both a photographic and a painterly experience, the ladder of which is particularly in effect when the brush strokes loosen. Each of the works works with figure and ground, usually a dominant figure in the composition, but cut out forms of other anatomical and geometrical features are painted in and superimposed on top of the dominant figures, breaking the continuity of any individual part and inventing possibilities for the viewer's iimagination and associations.
Meaning through the use of iconic and fetishistic imagery echoes some of David Salle's earlier work, though Cris does an altogether more excellent job handling the paint.
On the whole, the show is quiet, conservative with an edge and refreshingly spiritual, albeit with a fractured, dislocate aura about it. The inner pursuit is there and we the audience will feel it.
