Steve LaRose’s latest works come off to me like personal theater, an interesting counterpoint to the cinematic and theatrical backdrops, props, and the interior design pieces he squeezes into his schedule to keep the bills paid. In those commercial gigs you’ll witness a master’s brilliant brush handling through the perfect simulation of marbles and woods and in depictions of landscapes and objects of all kinds. Many of these works require achingly slow processes, the use of carefully planned and practiced techniques and a perfectionist’s refusal to be easily satisfied.The images in this show present a near-perfect opposition. Steve’s mastery is present and accounted for, to be sure, but he brandishes it with a decidedly different attitude. Each image is a whole-hearted assertion of itself, making its stand in slashing fortissimos, needle-in-your-eyes pizzicatos, and strange text-like scrawls that mumble funny poetry beneath the screech of ice pick on black board. Brilliant moments of nuance pray quietly within the larger bodies of strokes, bending and shaping the experience of some pieces and rewarding repeated viewings.
It’s tempting to attempt some interpretations, to try to ferret out content and influences. As you do this it’s impossible not to notice how much you find yourself reflecting your own thoughts and ideas, your own mindset, so that ultimately Steve’s are a mystery unless he shares them through a title or in conversation. In these works I see haunted abstract landscapes in turmoil, buildings toppling over, threatening hydra-like beasts exploding in the sky, swarms of multi-legged sea creatures alternately spawning and attacking one another, bizarre animal courtship and rubbery hundred-eyed creatures yurbling from another dimension, among other things. Maybe that says more about me than it does about Steve, but then again, maybe not.
The sense that Steve has only recently discovered these strange beings only magnifies their uniqueness and their bizarre intrigue. The more threatening ones almost seem to communicate contemporary anxieties, and this seems to make sense when one considers that Steve has a young daughter, a development that’s bound to alter and enhance any artist’s concern for the future. These dark and even somewhat violent images exist side-by-side with paintings that to my eyes carry a great deal of humor. It’s hard for me to look at some of them and not think of the campy covers of science fiction paperbacks from the 1950’s and 60’s, or even of the most obscure B-movie monsters from the same period. It’s quirky and idiosyncratic work, by any estimation.Keeping in mind that Steve is capable of making a wide variety of materials and media do his bidding, his choice of almost the simplest means possible – paint and canvas, paint and paper – suggests a desire to minimize his own choices so that he can focus instead on the properties of a few different kinds of media. It also suggests that, even as he disgorges entire pseudo-biomes of pigment beasts, he’s also interested in drilling down to essences, and more interesting for me, he’s interested in understanding life on as basic a level as possible.
This approach is seen as well in his working method. Steve lays down gestures both directly and indirectly. He works with the physical properties of the paint, making them yield in a variety of ways -- brush strokes of all kinds, pouring, blowing at the paint through a straw, dragging objects through it – all while exploring the paint’s innate materiality. You almost get the sense that at any time any given painting might have crumpled into itself in a worthless puddle, yet his command of the media stays intact throughout each engagement. He takes the kinds of risks with paint that Evel Knievel once took with a motorcycle, only the results are much more entertaining and enduring, and, to my knowledge, have yet to cost Steve any trips to the Emergency Room.Steve LaRose is the kind of artist that exemplifies the current era of art making, in my estimation. He chooses to make his home in Ashland, Oregon, far from the major art centers of New York and Los Angeles. Portland and its eclectic cultural enclave lie a forbidding three hour drive up Interstate 5. He enjoys the kind of seclusion that’s lessened only somewhat by an Internet connection.
But as minimal as Internet connectedness is, I believe it’s facilitated and helped propagate the realization that artists can now work wherever they want and at the same time still participate in the contemporary art discourse on a number of meaningful levels, and, to some degree, nurture a realistic hope of being taken seriously. Through Steve’s blog and those of other artists, dealers and collectors, I’ve seen the kinds of discussions that once took place at a single Greenwich Village bar, but that contributed greatly toward shaping the last decades of the previous art narrative. It stands to reason that the current narrative, which might well be characterized by the cohering of styles and formats and movements entirely within individual artists, will continue to develop and to be an authentic discourse partly through these same means.
What leads me to believe this is that when I see the range of Steve’s work, the facility and the looseness with which he launches into it, the playfulness that results in such broadly emotive and evocative pieces, I’m influenced not stylistically or with regard to media, but attitudinally. I’m inspired to be just as playful, in fact to throw down to Steve’s playfulness and to try to be even looser, if that’s possible. His commitment is equally inspiring. And if every artist is to be his own art island, as seems to be the case now, then it’s the living of life itself, and the deployment of an artist’s practice, rather than the specific styles and media of that practice, that may be the defining attributes of the developing art narrative.
Bill Gusky wrote this essay for a catalog available from the Kristi Engle Gallery.
Evel Knieval died today.
