Artificial food and fast lights forge cheerful islands of color against gray and darkened streets in urban paintings by Marc Trujillo, memorializing the ghastly spread of ruthlessly economical architecture in beautifully rendered glazed grisailles. Trujillo’s technical oil portraits of buildings superficially resemble Edward Hopper’s urban nocturnes but shed Hopper’s comforting harmonies of nostalgia by using cold L.E.D.’s and strip lights for illumination. Hopper’s tones are warm and jazz-like and sing tragic melodies of men and women finding themselves alone. Trujillo’s songs of San Fernando, California’s streets are cold and electric and indifferent to individuality. Hopper's buildings tell us about people. Trujillo's people tell us about buildings which, while sterile, are the only personalities in these smooth paintings.
He calls the paintings his American purgatory. If Trujillo is our Virgil, we are his Dante to guide through the indeterminate space between the edge of hell and the gate to heaven. He shows us impersonal and unhappy meals and hungry trays, cold aisles and fluorescent airports, squaretiled supermarkets, buzzing refrigerators in minor-key and melancholy pictures of unloved places and thankless food staged in a grim, concrete city. He is the lover of loveless commercial architecture.
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Denne historien er fra March 2023-utgaven av American Art Collector.
Start din 7-dagers gratis prøveperiode på Magzter GOLD for å få tilgang til tusenvis av utvalgte premiumhistorier og 9000+ magasiner og aviser.
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Guardians of the Temple – Simon Dinnerstein reflects on The Fulbright Triptych 50 years later.
The Palmer Museum of Art at Penn State University exhibits Simon Dinnerstein's The Fulbright Triptych haunts the visual lexicon of 20th century American representational art. Fifty years have passed since Dinnerstein completed the painting in 1974.
A City Perspective
Leslie Gaduzo has always been interIested in art. Since childhood, he has been drawing constantly, from single point perspective drawings at age 10 to complex architectural drawings.
Living Legacy
The Butler Institue hosts Allied Artists of America's 110th Annual Juried Exhibition.
Elegant yet Approachable
The second edition of the RTIA Show presents even more art to explore and expanded special programming.
Figuratively Speaking
New York has always been an epicenter of artists on the edge of excellence, pushing the envelope and finding their voices.
JAMES AYERS: The Importance of Play
Like many artists, James Ayers' work took a turn during the Covid-19 pandemic. Seeing the enjoyment his kids took from playing with paint in his studio and exploring their creativity inspired him.
GINA MINICHINO: Playing with Food
Gina Minichino started her journey in visual arts because of Charles Schulz. \"He was my earliest influence for drawing and the reason I wanted to be a cartoonist,\" she says.
Island Light
The Cuttyhunk Island Artists' Residency is held in a sprawling, 100-year-old house on an island off the southern coast of Massachusetts.
Solitary Forms
Hogan Brown has been working with Arcadia Contemporary for two and half years and is excited to be featured in his first solo show at the gallery. He doesn't take for granted the many talented figurative painters Arcadia represents and is thrilled to be among them.
Living the Dream
Counterintuitively, David Gluck was a painter before taking up tattooing little more than a decade ago. While skin is a completely different substrate and ink a far cry from oil paint, the skills must be transferrable to some degree because there is a wait-time of nine months to get an appointment with him.