zombies on the wall
SEEING OUT LOUD: A ZOMBIE IN DETROIT
By Jerry Saltz, 2015
When Detroit artists began to jockey into the mainstream art world at the start of this century it seemed as if the other art centers would quickly eclipse them away again. The opposite has happened. Detroit now looks even more scrappy and sassy by comparison and is infused with a nothing-to-lose drive.
Working in that broken city for two decades, Jef Bourgeau has offered a measured but often biting, yet always exuberant outlook about the art of our times. He reshuffles the deck of art history, undermining orthodoxy, and twisting the clean linear progression of it all, occasionally laying brand new track along the way. And he has been lauded for it, and he has been condemned and censored for it too.
Bourgeau now puts abstraction, new abstraction specifically, at the center of his most recent body of work opening at Galerie Camille but he's not treating this current hot button art world issue as seriously or originally as he does the issue of pure digital painting. And yet with the success of one, Bourgeau trumps the other.
His solo show in Detroit is optically on fire, intellectually edgy, physically lush, and installed like a wrap-around panorama. His digital prints and canvases are vivacious and stylish, his touch and domineering scale alluring. The visual effects are riveting and the sweet smell of printer ink makes you get as close to these as one dog will to another. The overall effect is a mesmerizing tour de force of verisimilitude, love, and intimidation.
At the same time this work is decorator-friendly, especially in a contemporary apartment or house. It feels smart and looks hip. It’s all deployed in inventive arrangements that ape its source, digital media. Edge-to-edge geometric, or biomorphic composition is de rigueur, as are irregular grids, lattice and moiré patterns, ovular shapes, and stripes. For this aspect I especially like the term coined last year by the artist-critic Walter Robinson: Zombie Formalism. These computer paintings are glamorous in part because they are in such good art-historical taste.
Digital palette at hand Bourgeau has non-painted himself from 20th century abstraction into a 21st century corner, but for once it’s just where the artist feels most comfortable and exactly where he wanted to be. It’s in that place where he combines the dead-on vision of Duchamp with the deadpan irreverence of Warhol..
With over fifty works on display, confronting this much material in one room is daunting. But it's worth it if only to glean the mind of a true maestro in motion.
*A columnist and art critic for New York Magazine, Jerry Saltz has been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in Criticism three times, and won it once. He lives in New York City with his wife Roberta Smith, senior art critic for the New York Times.