Dennis Hollingsworth

Michael Minelli at WPA

Michael Minelli has a show next door at WPA, I tried to shoot a few pics to get it across to you. My camera lens is too long to avoid a flash shadow, so I went with it and let it happen. The piece above is tiny (the heads are like the tips of a matchstick, and exactly the same size), as you can see in this pic.

Here's a panorama of the show, showing all three categories of his practice: the rolled up poster, the tiny figurines and what I call Darth Vader's neurons, a representation of musical amps withe various handmade tubes cantilevering out into space, all dipped in sumi-e ink:

(I tucked a nice accident under the fold...)

The thing about Minelli, is that what I call his figurines (my nomination, I'm not sure what he calls them) are made of a material like sculpty, they are straightforward to the point of crudeness but full of telling detail, cues, that allow a strong sense of verisimilitude. The little guys look like little guys. There is a dark or sinister element to them, Goya's Disasters of War come easily to mind. In Goya's early paintings, he would paint a pastoral landscape where with closer inspection, you can witness with a squint, a scene of mayhem, theft and murder.