Lane Hagood, Homage to Crawdad, painting on canvas, 2010
This painting is driving me crazy because I know it's a parody of a well-known painting of judges at a salon in 19th century France. But my visual memory is failing me and the internet isn't saving my bacon. I can't remember who painted the original. (Update: Yes, art-lovers. It's based on Hommage à Cézanne by Maurice Denis, painted in 1900.)
No matter. This painting is typical of Hagood's interests as an artist. He is fascinated with collections of things--objects, artworks, specimens. He refers to various works and group of works as "salons." This word is meant in the old sense of a painting competition as opposed to a collection of people gathered for conversation (though I suspect Hagood would be interested in the latter type of salon as well.) Images of 18th and 19th century salons showed paintings stacked on top of one-another, filling the walls. This horror vacui is as typical of collectors as it is of collections.
Lane Hagood, Abstract Salon, acrylic on canvas, 2010
So you get works like this which are abstract paintings on one hand but are collections of abstract paintings on the other. A single abstraction has the potential to be a heroic, sublime work of modernism--the sort of quasi-religious work that brought modernism to an ultimate crisis. But a collection like this is post-modern. This kind of work recalls Yves Klein more than Mark Rothko. It is more about the spectacle of paintings, the concept of exhibiting them. It specifically reminds me of Yves Klein's Yves Peintures, a catalog of paintings that didn't exist. The Abstract Salons (there are several in the show) are depictions of abstract paintings that don't have independent existence.