Thomas Frontini | Limbo Karma for solo exhibition at Lawrence Asher Gallery, Los Angeles

As a painter, Thomas Frontini is a very good spinner of tales. He sees magic in the mundane, and explores the themes of creativity, youthful experience, and the transformative power of the imagination. His characters contain a degree of emotional depth comparable to those in narratives. They arise out of myth and memory, and often enter from his intimate emotional life, and aid him in dramatizing various parables on creativity, family, and the search for identity. They project a quality of innocence that is part fancifulness and part fantasy, affirming Frontini’s earnest appreciation for the rigor of dreams. The structure of fantasy has its base in allegory--the construction of an ethos through divergent modes of expression. A fantasy is more than a single fabrication, but a complication of means in collusion towards the end of setting up an exception to the mundane upon the model of an ethical exception. By creating an atypical progression of the real, the enabler of fantasies is creating a morally ambiguous but fresh universe to which we can easily apply new experiences and values. The stories of Thomas Frontini are each paeans to the mysterious yet curious imagination of children. In some cases they are learning to see, in others they are caught as if by a photograph in moments of leisure and possession that underscore the degree to which common experiences such as a day at the beach may be transformed into a subjective realm of emotionally charged experience that will in later years represent the magical and immutable character of their early youth, untrammeled by adult contexts or justifications.

The Artist Sees Only What He Believes (Nature’s Apprentice) shows a seated boy engaged in painting an image of his subject, another boy who happens to be a centaur, the creature out of ancient Greek myth who represented a primordial mingling of human intelligence and animal instinct. The painting upon his easel shows not the full figure of the centaur but only the face and mane of an actual horse. The horse which he paints is iconic, almost as if it were merely a statue in stone or bronze, a symbol of inherent ‘horseness’ that it is perhaps easy to forget when faced with a stunning creature such a centaur, who speaks with reason, and yet moves around in the world with the speed and ease of a four-legged animal. The element of overt unreality in this picture serves to illustrate the boy’s understanding of nature, which is to say the separation of the character of his subject from his over manifestation in reality. Painting by young boys is not the same as that done by men; it is meant as a means of exploring the unknown in order to seek the origin of visual values that will translate into empirical ones. The boy in this picture uses his imagination to seek our essence instead of relying upon the details of an overly fantastic daily reality, forging a link between the imagination and moral character.

In Girl in the Forest (Feral Princess) we have another artist in training, who has stopped to turn her face to the viewer, and in this moment’s repose, we are able to see her in her own sense of emotional stasis--a cipher for the sake of her art, and otherwise mute. The painting is a self-portrait but it is in great contrast to the figure herself and the dynamic yet sensuous genre of her immediate surroundings, which are filled with loaded meaning. She is accompanied by the figure of an elf, of the ceramic kind made to sit in suburban front yards for Christmas celebrations; here, in the lushness of spring he looks out of place, but he remains jolly, laughing loudly while holding onto his belt, as if he might lose himself to the force of his emotion. The woods around her are lush and deep, and the area immediately around her is filled with birds that flit about and, one can imagine, sing freely and with much animation, while she sits frozen, holding a ball upon which perches a small blue bird. The self-portrait at her side seems to echo her own stilled form, lacking only the ball and the bird. There is a quality of guarded, nearly malevolent patience in the young girl, as if she has been interrupted in the middle of very intent play--a ritual she values but which also represents her privacy. She waits to resume it while not indicating any other emotional trait; though her familiars, animal and mythological alike, continue undisturbed in the mischievous tenor of their day.

In Everything She Needs (North Michigan Beach Scene) the artist depicts the charming yet innocuous image of a young girl and her dog, a standard poodle whose fur has been sculpted and painted bright pink in a manner common to the pets of the wealthy. Though she is as tall as the dog, and though its very appearance marks it as the subject of certain female flights of fancy--typically girlish coloring, dressing up, etc--it is a large dog and its sheer size and directness of countenance also mark it as a protector or the girl, whose expression belies only the satisfaction of a carefree summer day at the beach. Again, in “Puppy an Ponies” a small girl is seated on a red and white tasseled rug accompanied by her pet, a small white dog, and in the presence of two large domestic horses, and upon the hindquarters of one of them, a small pink owl. The horses have white flowing manes and dark glowering eyes, and stand quite still over her, one facing the viewer, the other turned aside and moving his head to correspond to a likewise perspective. The ground around them is covered with the deep marks of their hooves and the scene behind them shows a path between hills with a light blue and ever deepening dusk. In both of these paintings Frontini depicts the close relationship between animals and children, in which the child attaches herself to them not only as familiars of the natural world, which animates their emotional desires and hides them from adults with their rules and sensible teachings about “the way of the world,” but also they in some way become personas, friends and gods in one instant. The child has one main desire: to remain in the moment; to continue the level of instinctual learning that need seek only further sensation, and to revel in instinct as a disavowal of intelligent learning.

Finally, we have the oblique yet earnest image of The Birth of the Great Balladeer in which the artist portrays a very fantastical scene underscoring the desire for popularity, even heroism as presented by the innate ability for song. The image shows a large pool of water with coral, seashells, a starfish and lobster in it, and amidst all this, four beautiful mermaids wave to the viewer while holding large red conch shell upon which stands a gangly and pale naked young man holding a guitar, ready to play. The sky behind him is filled with the inverse plume of a nuclear explosion, as if the magic of his ability were instantly transmitted to heaven. This image is part revelation of myth and its place in poem and song, and part repressed fantasy. The balladeer and the painter have much in common; each expresses an immutable truth but suffers for it to be borne through the inequities of the role the artist has in everyday life. His is not viewed as a practical function in society, and the gains are less immediately recognizable than those conferred by wealth or power. He may be loved or admired, he may even alter the fabric of reality, but he belongs to myth. The mermaids in this painting are not mothers for they have no human wombs; they are like spiritual sisters who have produced, through sheer force of will, a spirit of creative expression to give value to the nature of experience on the human plane of existence. They are presenting a gift to man and will soon recede into the mists of time. Like Venus on the half shell, the poet stands for love even as he stands alone, an antihero who cannot partake of what he offers.

The paintings of Thomas Frontini all ask a very basic question: Where does imagination come from? Clearly, it is born in the mind of the child, a mental construction of reality which stops time and reverses the normal flow of logic to serve fantastic and sensate ends. The child possesses an imagination that has not yet been curtailed by adult logic, the burgeoning impulses of maturity, or by too much factual knowledge. What the child understands has been gained mainly by a degree naive empiricism, which includes the imaginary and mythical tales which he or she has been told. We tell such tales to children because we hope to instill in them a fascination for the unknown, and because such tales, beyond their overt veneer of symbolic reality, also contain idealistic values that should predate any harder truths to come along later in life. Imagination comes from being innately innocent, believing that all things are possible. The paintings of Thomas Frontini are one step in the right direction.

Mike Cockrill "By Innocence Bound" at 31 GRAND | WBURG

When we were young, the world seemed completely open to us. It was filled with promise, and we were excited - if uncertain - about what would happen. In many ways, the process of becoming a human being is similar to that of developing an artistic sensibility. We begin as clean slates and slowly, through trial and error, aided by an interiority of uninformed impulses, develop a sensibility which begins to resemble a set of convictions, allowing us to proceed within our purview and ultimately beyond. For these processes to develop, a degree of projection is needed, and art provides just such an outlet. The paintings in Mike Cockrill’s solo exhibition, Then Again, narrate a period of youth during which a variety of anonymous characters – in this case, mainly young girls - experience life in all its wonderful complexity. The entire duration of life is neither available to us through these images, nor does Cockrill consider it useful nor revealing to narrate a life's full span. He focuses on the interval between two greatly dramatized yet nominally understood states: childhood and maturity. The word "innocence" describes a state of absence, a blissful ignorance waiting to be filled with ideas and experiences from which a suitable set of convictions can be formed. It denotes a lack of culpability in matters of adult moral agency, and yet it also presents us with a value which is constantly under review. It is hard to know what innocence means, except as a symbolic embodiment of everything we know unlearned from the start. Its opposites are well known to us: lust, evil, or knowledge. Yet the innocent present us with a paradox of unfathomable limits. Their openness is like a weapon, a standard with no clear message. They are closer to beasts than men. The innocents that Mike Cockrill portrays are for the most part children. In some cases they are quasi-adult children, or young women, or adult women transforming from knowing adults into pawns in dramas where adult agendas are instantly suspect. This is a complex exhibition, instantly adding to the variety of forms in Cockrill’s previous body of work, and, aided by a will toward multivalence and idiosyncrasy, successfully presenting characters emerging from stereotypes into full-blown personae. The most easily perceived works are four large canvases, 5 x 4 feet in size, depicting dramas in which a female persona, whether a mother, daughter, or beloved childhood companion, symbolizes an alteration in childlike consciousness - a dream of simple idealism, attraction turning into awe, or bittersweet love from afar. Readily informed pictorially by religious, mythological, and propagandistic sources, these transformations prove no less effective for Cockrill's use of a large range of visual agendas. The evidence of such influences proves how important they are from a societal level down to a personal one.

In the first of these large canvasses, Men with Arrows Plan Our Future (all works 2004), we are presented with a scene out of the mists of childhood, a happy accident that leads one from ignorance into lust: a young boy hangs around with his mother as she completes household chores such as laundry. When she kneels down to lift the basket, he is inadvertently given a full view of her womanhood, including her legs above the knees and her full breasts. Her eyes averted while at her task, she is both unconscious of his sudden and instinctually informed attentiveness while simultaneously becoming the vessel for his desire. The momentous quality of such a simple event is underscored by the depiction of a space rocket’s final section landing in the ocean, accompanied by a billowing parachute and identified with a large black arrow like the type appearing on NASA flight charts. Besides this image, there are also background images which include a living room couch and a large, ranch-style suburban home - stereotypically American - combining the aura of a traditional family with the generic style of mass-produced domesticity.

In another large canvas titled The Iliad, Cockrill depicts a young girl caught in the whirlwind of her own deeply repressed emotions. This painting does not contain a single dramatic event, but rather attempts to capture the emotional tenor of her world-view. The girl is spindly and fragile-looking, dressed in sensible shoes, knee high striped socks, a zipped white windbreaker, and thick black frame glasses. She stands in the center of the painting with an assortment of images surrounding her in the manner of a high-school scrapbook: two cute puppies; her younger brother drawing in a book; a little Dutch or Amish boy cranking a town water pump; military jets booming through the sky; an aircraft carrier moored in port somewhere far away. While her mother paints the blank background around the edge of her face with a whitewash, a mysterious male hand covers the bottom half of the picture with the same substance. The little girl stands on a large image of an aircraft carrier that is made to seem less realistic than the ones depicted in separate frames. It seems to be almost a chariot for her, to carry her through anxiety and fear into safety, or which functions as the presence of a father - a long lost warrior out to sea - who will return to complete her life as she can never do on her own.

A third large canvas, Ascension, presents a woman in the throes of an excessive emotional state, though one which expresses an opposite state of mind from the previous one described here. The woman in this picture is older, and has the Rubenesque body of someone who has born a few children. She is clad in a gossamer teddy, and surrounded on all sides by gaily singing boys and girls, a large, cheerful country home with a spacious front yard, as well as by a jet plane and the small background image of a woman packing a suitcase. Although all is depicted in straight lines and bright colors, we can only come to certain conclusions here. The painting represents an actual and symbolic celebration of the artist’s own mother: surrounded by her beautiful and adoring progeny, she is portrayed not only as the successful proprietress of her household, but also as a woman both sensual and idealistic who dreams of both further richesse and future travel - an independent departure from her current circumstance into one of as yet unreckoned possibility. Again, there is no father or husband figure present.

The Madonna of the Roses depicts a scene of mundane gaiety which is quickly transformed - by the excising of a single object - from one of camaraderie and youthful joy on the edge of desire, into one of spiritual awe. A young girl is skipping rope, holding in one hand a flower which perhaps the young boy at her side has just given her. In the midst of a single leap her ropes disappear and she is made to levitate: the frills on her two-piece jumpsuit fly up in the breeze while her gaze lowers down to the viewer, giving her a serenity and earnestness beyond her years. The young boy, dressed fancily for church with a white shirt and large bow at his neck, is caught in mid-sentence, either in the throes of religious ecstasy or love for his suddenly blessed companion.

A series of single portraits fills out the show, some on canvas in oil and others on paper in watercolor. Each provides an allegory or narrative which expands our ability to see in women and children what Cockrill sees. In The Good Child, a young girl prays before bedtime, her hands folded before her in the customary gesture. But instead of a solemn face dedicated to moral purpose, we see a girl whose love of God and trust in the truth of ritual brings her immediate joy - which Cockrill has dramatized by painting clown lips over the girl’s own. White and large with a slight outline of black, such lips make the girl into a primal force for unabashed glee, as well as a devout worshipper. Not My Rainbow, Dog Day Afternoon, Virgin in Spring, and The Rainy Day - each portrays a young girl or woman who is given to the contemplation of solitude. Some of these maidens seem to be taken from the images of melancholy characters that illustrate front covers of ten-cent paperbacks. Others seem lifted directly from literature as varied as Little Red Riding Hood, Heidi of the Hills, Nabokov’s Lolita or from the paintings of Balthus. Despite their overly generalized imagery, and sampling from multiple sources, these portraits lose nothing in the way of emotional message or urgency, and serve to reinforce our attentiveness to the culturally-informed contexts of Cockrill's idiosyncratic perceptions on storytelling, emotional narrative, and idealization of women. I

In viewing these paintings, we look back upon a dim memory of a time when we were just beginning to actively form our sense of self. Moments of contemplation and accidental scenarios of loaded significance - even generalized periods spent under the sign of a particular impression or event - all contributed significantly to how we developed in our later years. It’s clear to see that Mike Cockrill has a special love for women, and whether this originates from his own role as a father or the golden memories of his distant youth, it is the degree of parable in these images that charms and seduces us. Woman is the divine Other - a force for emotional and spiritual change. In our earliest years we are naturally dependent upon a mother figure. As we mature, it is to a mother or sister that we are drawn to make the first observations of newfound sexuality – as either a mirror or vessel for desirous projection. The resulting start of a new set of moral values also represents the loss of a previous, if unfulfilled, set of childlike values, in which the character of a family member may easily take on a degree of mythical significance. Each of these personae, individually or as a complementary set, represents an equal and opposite force to our own nature, which is then defined only by the choices we make and our evaluation of qualifying the general state of affairs surrounding and coloring such judgments. As Oscar Wilde once said, "the story of your life is not your life…it’s your story". Mike Cockrill reminds us of the importance of knowing the difference.

Carla Gannis | Sampling Identity for the solo exhibition "Travelogue" at Pablo's Birthday Gallery

Identity is the cornerstone of our being and the means by which we impose some small degree of order upon the world, which is always in a state of growth and flux. What we may or may not comprehend is that identity itself is likewise in flux, and though we may often hold to the belief that it represents a fixed quantity, we are hard-pressed to decide which elements define our individual ideas of our selves. In history, when mankind has been in a state of doubt, it has searched for symbols to represent the qualities it most admires or despises. Those first took the form of mythology, then later of religious devotion, and much later—and in some ways finally—the precepts of science. The journey through belief is itself a journey to self-knowledge, and it is through art that man has often found himself seated before not only a fount of valuable learning, but also before a mystery whose purpose has yet to be told.

Individual artists throughout history have created oeuvres that present pictorial views of reality which impress upon the viewer a regard for beauty and order, for depravity and chaos, and for the mystery and opacity of abstraction. A common thread between each of these aesthetic agendas has been that the works reveal a degree of symbolism that relates directly to our manner of approach, and not to the overt subject matter on view. We must be able to take from the work of various artists what is given, in the combinations of complex and hybrid meaning that are intended. Symbolism works best when it is connected to a depiction of reality that is loaded with varied degrees of context yet allows us to detach ourselves and consider a work’s themes without any expectation that it will fall in line, aesthetically or morally, with the mundane aspects of our daily lives. What art reveals is the connection between conscious and unconscious recognition, whether that relates to fantasy versus reality or to accepted versus taboo ideas and beliefs. Carla Gannis utilizes the appearance of reality to create a context of transparent pastiche which ironically juxtaposes received knowledge with aesthetic phenomenon. Her characters are sampled from various cultural contexts, including her own life, art history, mythology, and the mainstream media; yet a working knowledge of the inner recesses and psyche of the artist's life may be necessary in order to gainsay the character of each image. Whether through individual choice or the agency of unseen forces, every character expresses a loaded and subjective vulnerability, either by appearance or mood, or by a transformation depicted in the physical situation. Likewise, the situations themselves, as paired with the actions of her characters, are made to represent a perverted perspective of the logic behind narrative and causality. This is achieved by her use of the "sample," a technique that is relatively new in cultural terms, though it is similar in effect to gene-splicing, when scientists combine, for example, the genes of different flowers to experiment with the physical consequences of crossbreeding. As a cultural process, sampling became popular in the early 1980s with rap music, in which musicians would take a passage of music from another artist's recordings and layer their own tunes or words over it. This began to occur in other musical forms over time. The synth-pop band Depeche Mode became especially well known for its practice of sampling such disparate sounds as spinning helicopter blades, shattering glass, or skidding car brakes, and adding them to a rhythmic or syncopated beat to form the backbone for their songs. In the age of digital culture, sampling has become a very accessible practice that allows artists to combine images from various origins and seamlessly meld them into an overt new reality. Such is the case in Gannis's "Travelogue Series". The concept of narrative is a strong element in these works. Each of the images tells a story, and though very little is provided for the viewer to draw a conclusion, it is clear that there is more going on than what is depicted. The narrative that Gannis wants to show us is essentially a psychological one, in which factual details are not as important as emotional ones. Each story has to do with a strong psychic impression that she has held at one time or another. The degree of portent they hold and the manner of symbolism used to express that portent are the more telling qualities of her intention than anything more formal and explicit could suggest. For every period of emotional education in our lives there have been 'psychic turns,' moments of instantaneous clarity that have allowed us insight into the depth of our inner growth. Through these moments we are able to classify the movement from one state of being to another. From the inherent narrative quality of Gannis's imagery it can readily be surmised that she wishes to express the complexity of her issues in transit. Because the sense of reality Gannis seeks to impart is necessarily complex, it obligates the viewer, when looking for meaning to take on the whole image, replete with all of its visual and contextual associations. We must start with the myths that are built into them, and work back toward a description of the commonplace. In WAITRESS, for instance, we have a figure that is clearly a woman, but the kind of woman we see depends upon the order in which we accept the various symbolic aspects of her appearance and the dramatic situation she inhabits. Her assigned role is given her by the work's title, but she is plainly more than that. She wears the costume of a comic-book super hero, her body naked from the waist up. In the area that would comprise her stomach and her womb, there is only a spine, with her stomach and womb neatly excised from the ideal representation of female form that she otherwise fulfills. The setting is a traditional diner with leather booths, a long red carpet down the middle, and red-and-white "Coca-Cola" signs overhead. The situation in which the waitress is posed provides another puzzling context. She is paused in midair, as if she were about to leap into action. It is clear that WAITRESS presents us with a complex symbol simultaneously representing different models of female identity. The character is swathed in identities that together show us how narrative can be created from the depiction of an emotional state, and conversely, how an emotional state can be projected upon the viewer which generates an empathic reaction that is both symbolic and personal. The character in this scene is clearly a symbol of strength, one that exists to heighten our regard for pedestrian reality, and yet she is no mean caricature, governed equally by idiosyncrasy as by heroism. She does not need to be involved in some cosmic clash or daring rescue to possess the rank we give her; her position as a mere wage slave presses this upon us. Her further state, in which she is deprived of the attributes that biologically define her and make her human, such as the need for sustenance and procreation. Gannis sets the stage for our reactions just as she manipulates the view. She wants us to understand that truth is not a one-sided coin, and that just as all persons can be symbols, such symbols can mean, and achieve, as much as individuals do in their private lives.

n LAST DAYS IN MEXICO we are presented with the scene of a crime in which there are three players, the villain, his victim, and a mysterious witness. The crime is a murder. A man in a dapper suit stands above a prone Pan-like figure with the furry body and cloven hoofs of a goat and the face of a woman. The setting is a large warehouse with one bright light high above on the ceiling, and the otherwise drab appearance of dirty white and industrial green paint. The Pan figure is joined in his fate by a naked woman with two moaning heads and wings that resemble those of a demonic butterfly. She is Hecate, queen of the underworld, a spirit who is present in the endgame of the hunt, and who presides over every event deemed a moral crossroads in life. She is a pagan figure, just as is Pan, and though he is a symbol of the decadence of late Greek society, she is a primordial figure who was once the Empress of Hell, predating even Hades himself. Her presence lends a sense of pathos to the death of Pan, and a vulnerability to the one human pawn here, who though he has been the harbinger of a certain decree of fate, is at this moment considering the efficacy of his role, lost in his houghts, thinking of the future.

A third and final example is THE BLUE CAR, another image that depicts a figure in the garb of a comic-book superhero, this one suggesting Superman, though in this case the character does not resemble our memory of him in the least. Our hero here is a small figure, curled into a fetal position as if sleeping, hanging upside down like a bat, with his cape wafting down to just above the surface of the earth. There is a lone witness to this event—a blue car that passes him in the middle distance—which makes us wonder about the identity of his spectators and of their intentions while he is both literally and figuratively 'wrapped up in himself.' We are made to feel a paternal or proprietary empathy for the sleeping hero, and a sense of dread for any unknown entity, even one provided by as innocuous a source as a simple automobile. As Francis Bacon said, "knowledge is power." Yet knowledge comes to us from various sources, and identity is the sieve through which such gleanings are processed. If we can say, this is who I am, then we are inviting chaos and mystery into our lives. Yet the progress of history has shown us that there are many directions from which knowledge can be approached. There is the scientific method, which is primarily deductive, and which looks at physical details and makes assumptions that usually fall in line with preconceived notions. Alternately, there is the symbolic method, found in Gannis’s images, in which a vast and unforeseen psychic province is tapped through the use of complex narratives that introduce us to characters who are as opaque as their symbols. The narrative and the symbolic intersect in these images, obscuring any one path to understanding, and moreover, subverting the misconception that there can be only one story in each image. As a means of emotional education, they are thrilling and mysterious models for the shape of our common unconscious, and the transitional quality they impart proves a doubly rich context for the evolution of aesthetic perception.