About a month ago, Lisa invited me and the kid out to Glassell Park to check out the latest show from painter Aaron Morse. The paintings were interesting, but not as much fun as the review Lisa wrote for Momus. I love when criticism can help you see the thing under discussion more clearly than before. For instance:
I was drawn to the artist’s new exhibition at Philip Martin Gallery in northeast Los Angeles, Lights Out for the Territories, by his attenuated, hyperreal clouds—white, cumulonimbus-wily, stretched, almost pixelated upward—and skies cerulean (or violet, or pitch black, or blood red) that convey his unsettled vision of an expansive, celestial West.
Lisa tries to situate Morse’s work in the recent vogue for “Westernalia” but ends up finding resonances with artists stretching back through mid-century sci-fi zines, ’90s comic books, and even the woodcut artist Tom Killion. She explains, “In layering and drawing these styles together, Morse’s paintings stun the reader into a kind of dreamy present.”
