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Nathan Redwood
Constant SpeedCarl Berg Gallery
6018 Wilshire Boulevard, Los Angeles
(323) 931-6060 www.carlberggallery.com
Constant Speed
Nathan Redwood cooks up another batch of roiling cataclysmic soup in his recent paintings, worthy follow-ups to his stunning debut last year. Warnings, chronicles, visions, prophecies -- the paintings churn with the twinned energies of creation and destruction. Each scene marries post-apocalyptic bleakness to the inventive, resourceful charm of regeneration.
Antenna conjures the contingency of a survivor's raft. Broad, discrete strokes of ocher, umber, blood, and black define the shifting foreground while a faint cityscape in murky gold anchors the horizon. Bobbing in the liquid morass is a tenuous assemblage of debris -- a car tire, a broken cane with duckbill handle, a sinuous stick of driftwood, a solid gold lightning bolt, and a disembodied arm holding a nozzle spewing a looping swirl of red. Such incongruity seduces as much as it disarms. A reckoning of some sort, Katrina-style or nuclear, has taken place. The atmosphere is thick with a chemically derived luminosity, sickly and powerful.
Redwood builds his images on a foundation of myth and history, scattering references to gods and artists alike. With rollicking physical humor, he connects his disparate parts in the manner of Rube Goldberg contraptions or stream-of-consciousness rebuses. In the epic 3000, waves rise like shards, and the indigo sky is spattered with sticky white froth. An obsolete-looking, hand-cranked device teetering in the golden current spits out a long cerulean ribbon that loops around to grip the crank's handle, as if to keep itself issuing forth. Things are cobbled together and ripped apart. The human and the supernatural collide with wild, hilarious abandon. Redwood's brushstrokes are vigorous, tempestuous, seeming to press the question: how will we survive ourselves?
Antenna conjures the contingency of a survivor's raft. Broad, discrete strokes of ocher, umber, blood, and black define the shifting foreground while a faint cityscape in murky gold anchors the horizon. Bobbing in the liquid morass is a tenuous assemblage of debris -- a car tire, a broken cane with duckbill handle, a sinuous stick of driftwood, a solid gold lightning bolt, and a disembodied arm holding a nozzle spewing a looping swirl of red. Such incongruity seduces as much as it disarms. A reckoning of some sort, Katrina-style or nuclear, has taken place. The atmosphere is thick with a chemically derived luminosity, sickly and powerful.
Redwood builds his images on a foundation of myth and history, scattering references to gods and artists alike. With rollicking physical humor, he connects his disparate parts in the manner of Rube Goldberg contraptions or stream-of-consciousness rebuses. In the epic 3000, waves rise like shards, and the indigo sky is spattered with sticky white froth. An obsolete-looking, hand-cranked device teetering in the golden current spits out a long cerulean ribbon that loops around to grip the crank's handle, as if to keep itself issuing forth. Things are cobbled together and ripped apart. The human and the supernatural collide with wild, hilarious abandon. Redwood's brushstrokes are vigorous, tempestuous, seeming to press the question: how will we survive ourselves?