January 7, 2007
Todd Hebert Opens at Mark Moore Gallery
(Detail)
I hitched a ride with Jean Milant to see Todd Hebert's show that opened last night at Mark Moore Gallery. Here's a blurb from the gallery website:
In this series of work, Hebert uses his signature airbrush technique to juxtapose bubbles and snowmen in contrasting planes of perspective. He positions these precisely formed characters in unpopulated backyards that are ?too strangely lit, too moody and impossible, to reflect the real world,? as Jessica Hough from the Aldrich Museum muses, ?we naturally want to bring the image into sharp focus so that we can see all of what we think is there. But then we realize that the beauty and appeal of the paintings is in part due to this gossamer fog that cloaks the landscape.?
Some thoughts:
-Check out the little tiny impasto dabs, cousins of the monad. The tiny shadows from the spot lights are essential to the image, I think.
-The bubbles have high chroma relfections, a kind of mirror that indicates the prescence of... you? Todd?
-My first thought when I first zeroed in to the bubble (funny, too, that one zooms in and out taking in close and long views at their full extents) was that perhaps Todd scribed the form in with a bottle cap as Frances Bacon did, a form of printing. I wonder if he did it this way? Certainly, it would be nerve wracking to hand draw perfect circles otherwise.
-There is a reflection of Richter, perhaps? Gerhard's famous blur paintings are simultaneously invoked and denied: a blur delivered by machine (air brush) versus one dellivered by hand (Richter's brushed alla prima schmear), a reversal of Richter's subordination of painting to photography, a denial of the blur of the long view by the inclusion of the close focal plane of the bubbles, an acknowledgement of photography in a larger way that loads up the bag of painter's tricks...
-I like the celebration of wonder, something natural for children and something furtive for adults who forgot they were children once.
Here's a 35 seconds of the show:
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