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Julian Tan: "Jesus what am I even doing? "oh thanks buddy" (Iphone in Sink)"
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Henry Bell: “Predator Room”
Sublime 19th century American landscape paintings aren’t quite at the forefront of the L.A. art scene today, but artists Henry Landes Bell, Lee Piechocki and Julian Tan are drawing inspiration from the values presented by the Hudson River School and refracting them back to the audience through the lenses of past ideals and present reality.
“Reverent Revenant Remnant Referent” has been in the works since August. All of the artists’ pieces will “deal with the landscape in a condensed urban environment” in their own ways, according to Bell.
“I want people to feel the feeling of being in these spaces, of being in a place where your presence or absence no longer matters but once did…that kind of melancholy,” Bell said of his five pieces premiering at the show’s Keystone Gallery opening on Saturday, January 18th.
Julian Tan: “Jesus what am I even doing? “oh thanks buddy” (Iphone in Sink)”
Bell’s meticulously detailed oil paintings (each took upwards of 100 hours to complete) depict urban abandonment in a way he hopes the audience finds as inspiring as he does.
“There’s something so sublimely beautiful, and I mean sublime in the sense that I can’t imagine anything more achingly sad, than to see our world fall in on itself,” he said. “There’s something about these empty spaces and these open spaces where [there was once] noise and smoke and chaos, and now there’s just quiet and this sense of everything falling back into balance.”
The idea for the show was mostly a no-brainer for Bell, who’s been quietly enamored with the Hudson River School since his art school days. He wonders why oil painting is sometimes deemed anachronistic and challenged in contemporary art.
Lee Piechocki: “Catoptromancy”
“I’d tried a lot of different painting techniques, but they were all monstrously disappointing to me. And so I took it back to oil painting, and it was everything to me. I just loved it,” Bell said. “A lot of artists owe a lot to the Hudson River school, but not a lot [of artists] in the hip contemporary scene will give it much credit. The work has some real value, at least in terms of technique if not in terms of subject matter.”
The audience can decide for themselves how much contemporary value stems from the ground laid by the Hudson River School’s “rich douchebags,” as Bell cheekily referred to the movement’s artists when addressing the less desirable side of its history. (It was largely funded by industrialists and heavily reflected and influenced the Manifest Destiny movement, which was detrimental to countless Native Americans.) Perhaps in “Reverent Revenant Remnant Referent” viewers will find the same quiet beauty in sitting with today’s decaying urbanity that past Americans did in embracing the pastoral unknown.
“Reverent Revenant Remnant Referent” opens Saturday, January 18th, 2020 at Keystone Gallery near Los Angeles State Historic Park at 6:00 pm. The 15 pieces by Bell, Piechocki and Tan will be available for viewing from 9:00 am to 5:00 pm for two weeks thereafter.
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