James Valentine: Paintings
CONDUIT 742 presents James Valentine Paintings –
a survey of works by self-taught Los Angeles artist James Valentine – drawing from four decades of painting practice – most of which have never been publicly exhibited.
Each group of works conjures Valentine’s take on a particular cultural moment in the imaginative history of Los Angeles, stretching from the artist’s days in the LA punk scene to his current suburban self-exile in Long Beach.
Even a group of paintings as comically distanced as his Last Supper/Stations of the Cross series (which depicts the crucifixion narrative in subliminal imagery embedded in the food photographs on “Last Supper” brand TV dinner boxes) elicits the pre-Helter Skelter lowbrow/hibrow blur of the 80s LA art scene perfectly.
In addition to functioning as historical portals, Valentine’s paintings are a record of a deeply personal and idiosyncratic engagement with formal issues, materials, art history, and the crisis of representation that has driven modern art since the invention of photography.
While frequently paying overt homage to painters like Van Gogh, El Greco, Francis Bacon, David Hockney, and Andy Warhol, Valentine also shows affinities with picture-makers as disparate as Peter Saul, Philip Guston, Paula Rego, and Georg Baselitz – all of whom (except those first two) struggled to make images of people, places, and things that had currency in a Post-Pollock world.
Along the way we are privileged to witness the progress of an isolated artist, grappling with and assimilating the formal and conceptual vocabulary of modern painting, with puns dumb enough to be John Baldessari’s and painterly passages exquisite as an Impressionist master’s.
In spite of this embedment in the language and history of Art, Valentine’s work retains a quietly insurgent outsider energy – a restless shifting of styles and strategies leading from his Balloonist portraits of the Germs, the Ramones and Johnny Rotten to the Zen clarity of the recent landscapes systematically depicting his Long Beach neighborhood.
Valentine’s personal story arc is equally idiosyncratic, with his punk credentials offering entry to the film industry, his artistic temperament landing an almost chance career (things like that happened in the olden days) as a rostoscoper – the special effects technique invented by animator Max Fleischer, consisting of painstaking hand-painting over photographic film sequences – and one of the most authentic engagements with the aforementioned Crisis of Representation in contemporary visual culture. The artist speaks for himself:
“A self-taught artist has an idiot for a teacher. I was born in 1950 into a religious cult that believed picture making, dancing and singing on key were sins. Viet Nam and the Kennedy assassination showed the government lies. Poor people don't have museums and look for art in advertising, comic books and movies. I wanted to work in the movies.
Drawing was free entertainment and education without bullying teachers. Art History was available in libraries. I began to paint.
A spiky haircut got me jobs in TV commercials, leading to a 30 year career working on Hollywood movies including Tron, Star Wars, Titanic and Spiderman. Computers made visual effects so common that it became more cost effective to ship all the work to India. I published songs and made short films. I moved to Long Beach and my paintings started to look for something in common between Giovanni Canaletto and Mary Blair.”
CONDUIT 742 is a pop-up project space dedicated to exhibiting art by artists. James Valentine: Paintings is CONDUIT 742’s initial public offering.
James Valentine: Paintings
CONDUIT 742
742 N. Cahuenga Blvd, Hollywood, 90038
OPENING RECEPTION Saturday July 19 4 - 8 PM
Open by appointment conduit742@gmail.com
Illustrated catalog/zine with essay by Doug Harvey available
