Betsy Huete’s Top Ten of 2014

Betsy Huete

Sure, there are a lot of top ten lists out there, and in the last week or so they’ve come in droves. I’ve seen the top exhibitions of the year several times over from all different kinds of people, websites, blogs; the top ten art lists from Hyperallergic; Artnet’s fifty most interesting artists and most important essays; and so on. Hell, Robert even posted two top ten lists in the past week or so—one on comics and one on art books. So, surprise, surprise! I’m throwing my hat into the ring with my top ten pieces exhibited in Houston in 2014. Like last year, I’m being really specific, picking individual works instead of exhibitions. There have been many times, just like last year, where the exhibition as a whole either didn’t stand out to me or I didn’t have anything specific to say about it, yet a piece or two individually did something really special. Here they are:



10. Karyn Olivier, Still Life Series (Matinicus), 2014, How the Light Gets In: Recent Work by Seven Core Fellows at the Glassell School. These series of photographs are images of things that, in themselves, aren’t very interesting. Blemished painted foam, colored mirrors, and colored papers are a few objects that Olivier has arranged and photographed in various ways. But the precision of the photographs, like this one in particular, as well as the arrangement makes it look delectable, like cake.


Courtesy Devin Borden Gallery

9. Clark Derbes, Charlie, 2014, American Sculpture at Devin Borden. As a whole, this exhibition at Devin Borden seemed pretty tame and unassuming, which made Charlie stand out all the more. Derbes normally paints onto found wood, which is what he has done here. The truncated piece of wood twists, and the application of the colorful checkers make the whole piece feel elastic and dynamic. I have no idea who Charlie is or his relationship to Derbes, but if he’s anything like his sculpture, I want to meet this guy.


Courtesy Art Palace

8. Deborah Roberts, Buttress, One and Many at Art Palace. A collaged creature-woman floating in a large field of putrid gold abstraction, Roberts’ Buttress is brazenly disharmonious. The slightly slumped shoulders of the woman command our empathy with her vulnerability while still looking vile and distorted.


 (Photo by Adam Clay)

7. Carter Ernst, HOOT, Texas Sculpture Group 2014: A Panoramic View, Lawndale Art Center. Tucked in a corner on the second floor of Lawndale during the Texas Sculpture Group Exhibition, stood this larger than human height, fabric-covered owl. It felt huggable, until I stared into its bulbous, mirrored eyes. Ernst’s owl feels cute and ominous, and it reminds me a little of those giant puppets that used to play at Show Biz Pizza.


From stillinberlin.de

6. Hito Steyerl, How Not To Be Seen: A Fucking Didactic Educational .MOV File, 2013, Collective Reaction: FotoFest 2014, The Station Museum. With How Not To Be Seen…, Steyerl conveys exciting ideas about the intangible image as a physical material, and thereby questions what happens with our material bodies as we continue to communicate increasingly via images and pixels. She enumerates—within this framework—on how to disappear in not only a compelling but humorous way, suggesting that one could disappear by being a woman over the age of fifty.


Courtesy Inman Gallery

5. Angela Fraleigh, we held hands beneath the dirt, 2014, Ghosts in the Sunlight, Inman Gallery. Whatever is going on with this woman’s expression, which is deliberately unclear, we as viewers can’t help but wonder what’s happening to her, what she’s doing. With cropping, Fraleigh smartly gives us only partial access to this woman, effectively turning this painting from fully representational to an abstraction.


From glasstire.com

4. Julia Brown, The Dancer, 2014, The Core Exhibition 2014, The Glassell School. Brown doesn’t do much in this video: she simply points and shoots at a pre-pubescent girl dancing to a hip hop song. We see the girl practicing, running through some of the dance moves with ease and faltering through others. The girl eyes us in the camera, flitting from childlike innocence to the sexuality of a grown woman. Here, Brown simply and cleanly nails what it feels like to be an adolescent girl. I remember watching this the first time, actively cringing while also nostalgically reflecting on the slumber parties I would have with my best friends, staying up all night practicing N*SYNC choreography. Ok, that was last week.


From ggalleryhouston.com

3. Dylan Roberts, Bully, Beyond Graphite: Fab 15 + Performance, G Gallery. Bully is a putrid mixed media painting of skin-like pinks and reds with a seemingly wheat-pasted neon yellow drawing on top of it. The drawing is intricate and strange. The material underneath looks like melting plastic, like pimply, bubbling skin. Every time I look at this piece I want to vomit, which is why it is my number three pick.


From houstonmuseumdistrict.org

2. Wu Tsang, Moved by the Motion, 2014, Moved by the Motion, DiverseWorks. With Moved by the Motion, Tsang has constructed a dual projection short film with a loose narrative around the gender-ambiguous performer boychild. The film is unabashedly, almost absurdly, queer. Boychild—sensual, confusing, disgusting, beautiful, sexual—commands our attention, and it was impossible to stop watching her. Also, the beanbag chairs were exceptionally comfortable.


From glasstire.com

1. Paul Kittelson, Lawn Chairs, 2014, True North, Heights Boulevard esplanade. Let’s not lie. Public art can be boring. That’s usually because it has to filter through several committees first (see HAA fiasco), becoming a soulless skeleton of the artist’s original intent. But Kittelson’s lawn chairs sweetly garnered everyone’s attention and sense of nostalgia, making passersby squeal with glee as they climbed (illegally) onto the giant chairs, flailing their legs around as if they were little kids.

Questions About Casualism

Robert Boyd

So for the past two nights I have been sick in bed with a nasty cold. That means I missed a bunch of art openings I wanted to see and I regret that. Next weekend will be a time for catching up. But being sick gives one time to read. I read slowly when I'm sick. My brain doesn't work at peak efficiency when I'm sneezing and coughing. That's why my preferred sick reading is unchallenging stuff--science fiction, old Marvel comics, etc. But not always. Sometimes I catch up on my art reading. During the day, I'll see some article online that looks interesting but don't have time read to right at that moment. I'll email it to myself for future reference. So since I was sick, I dug up a couple of those pieces in my "to read" folder.

I've been interested in "new casualism" since I first heard the term. The term was coined by Sharon Butler, and as I understood the term, it seemed like a description for some painting I was seeing around Houston by certain young artists like Dylan Roberts and Brandon Araujo and others. But the definition of "new casualism" was so broad that it was hard to say where its boundaries lay.


Dylan Roberts, The New God


Brandon Araujo, untitled, 2013

So I was hopeful when Sharon Butler returned to the subject in a new article, "The Casualist Tendency" published on her blog, Two Coats of Paint. Of casualist paintings (she has dropped the "new"), she writes:

There is more to the studied, passive-aggressive irresoluteness of these canvases – which often leave large sections unpainted – than meets the eye. They reflect a concern with imperfection, extending beyond traditional Bauhaus principles of good design to the unfinished, the off-kilter, the overtly offhand, the not-quite-right. And, to my mind, they refreshingly embrace almost anything that seems to lend itself to visual intrigue – including formal artistic failure. 

But she acknowledges some of the criticism of this work, including the fact that "some old-school painters have branded the most obvious approaches ‘crapstraction.'" Casualist art is said to lack craft and attention to detail. It feels offhand, easy and like student work.

Butler defends it in part by pointing out that the same criticisms could be applied to many artists in the past (and have been). She refers, for example, to the older artists Rafeal Rubenstein wrote about in his article "Provisional Painting", as well as to the "bad painters" of the 90s (but not to the "bad painters" of the 70s) and even to Matisse. She refers to such painters as Elizabeth Murray (one of my all-time favorites) and Ree Morton who in the 1970s "countered the macho posturing of the minimalists by working from an intimate point of view that embraced messy everyday detail."

These all strengthen her case, but unlike the 70s when Elizabeth Murray seemed genuinely oppositional, I don't see an underlying reason for casualist painting to exist. You know how the modernist story goes: first this happened, and then this happened in opposition to the first thing, or building off the first thing, or building off some current in the culture at large--and repeat. That progressive meta-narrative of successive theories has collapsed under its own weight, but still the question remains--why does an artistic tendency like casualism exist? Butler doesn't try to answer that question in this short post, but I hope she's thinking about it because casualism is a real thing and worth thinking about.

But for casualism to survive as an idea, it needs to survive against criticism such as "Provisional Painting, Three Hypotheses" by Alan Pocaro published in Abstract Critical, a web magazine devoted to writing about abstract art. (One thing I love about the internet is that there can be online publications for every aspect of art, no matter how specific or obscure--abstract painting, for example, or art in Houston.)

In this short piece, Pocaro does what Sharon Butler doesn't do in either of her pieces on casualism. He offers up a theory of why it exists as an approach to abstract painting. In fact, he offers three theories, each from a different point of view. First is that "gifted writers" like Butler and Rubenstein have the ability to imagine something into being by virtue of their words. They can write eloquent praise of bad painting and be convincing. As a writer, I am perversely pleased by Pocaro's praise the power of words, but I don't quite believe it. Criticism--writing--seems to me to be at its weakest point in the history of art. This is born out empirically in Don Thompson's research in The $12 Million Stuffed Shark: The Curious Economics of Contemporary Art. (Or maybe not; here I am writing about art writing.) Anyway, I don't think he completely believes it either.

Instead, I think Pocaro probably would give greater support to his second thesis. He wrote about students he taught who were very cool people but did bad art.

Much of it looked “casual, dashed-off, tentative, unfinished or self-cancelling” and it frequently displayed “a studied, passive-aggressive incompleteness” that didn’t just court failure, it was set to marry it.

While Raphael Rubenstein might have called this work “Provisional Painting” and Sharon Butler may have dubbed it “The New Casualism”, at the Art Academy, a few adjunct instructors and I had a different term for it: Poseur-Art. Far from “reassessing basic elements like color, composition, and balance, based on 1920s-vintage Bauhaus principles” these students probably never understood those concepts in the first place, nor did they care. Much of the work appeared “causal” and “dashed-off” because it was, often moments before a group critique.

The quotes he embeds into the first paragraph are from Rafael Rubenstein and Sharon Butler. He suggests that this conception of art students "posing" as artists has really gone pro. "Is it really such a leap to go from Duchamp’s art-as-intention, to art-as-attitude?" he asks.

This seems very old fuddy-duddy. But I'm an old fuddy-duddy myself, and sometimes when I look at a work like some in the recent Dylan Roberts show at Scott Charmin, I wonder if it's just lazy, deliberately dumb work (the Pocaro reaction ) or if there is something interesting happen that I am struggling to understand (closer to the Butler position). The fact that I have these conflicting thoughts is what keeps me involved with this work. Roberts is an artist I am keenly interested in.

Pocaro's third hypothesis is that this rebirth of abstract painting, along with attendant theories about it or attempts to place it within a new school, is simply nostalgia. Holland Cotter alluded to this in his article in the New York Times last month, "Lost in the Gallery-Industrial Complex." Holland's bitter piece was widely passed around via social media. He was mainly attacking the crazy world of the ultra-rich art trade--something fairly alien to most of the artists and even most of the gallerists I know. But we're in Houston, not the New York art world that Cotter inhabits.

The place of abstract painting as nostalgia was just an aside, but I recall being thunderstruck when I read it.

Roughly since the end of the multicultural, postmodern 1990s, we’ve watched new art being re-Modernized and domesticated, with painting the medium of choice, abstraction the mode of preference. Together they offer significant advantages. Paintings can be assembly-line produced but still carry the aura of being hand-touched. They can be tailored to small spaces, such as fair booths. Abstraction, especially if color is involved, can establish instant eye contact from afar. If, in addition, the work’s graphic impact translates well online, where stock can be moved eBay style, so much the better. 

Pocaro isn't making this economic argument. His argument is that trying to invent movements in inherently a mistake.

This vaunted “re-birth” [of abstraction], hailed across the art-world, is merely another manifestation of the wider cultural nostalgia industry; a longing for the look, feel, and glories of the past in a backward-looking present thoroughly corrupted by indifference and cynicism. Since we cannot imagine what a future for abstraction might actually look like, a bevy of painters mine the past, adopting desiccated gestures as if there were meaningful aesthetic victories at stake. But there aren’t.

This sounds pretty much like Cotter so far. But then he adds:

There’s no reason to give up painting, but there are good reasons to stop making claims on its behalf. Disquisitions on “new developments” in abstract painting –or any kind for that matter- make for good copy, but they have the side effect of keeping last century’s spurious theories on life-support. The old arguments of modernism and post-modernism are worn-out, unproductive and irrelevant to the art of the 21st century. It’s time we set aside old habits and seek new avenues for production and new paradigms for discussion.

In a way this sounds like he's saying, "Stop writing down your thoughts about art." (A slightly weird stance for visual artist/art writer to take!) But I think he is misrepresenting Butler's reason for writing what she did. Butler is, like Pocaro, a painter herself. A painter who is also a prolific critic is not someone I'd ever call a poseur, whatever I thought of the quality of her work (about which I have no opinion because I've only ever seen reproductions online). As a painter, Butler writing about a tendency she has observed in painting strikes me as a way for her to understand her own practice within the artistic community in which she resides.

I wrote this to help myself understand a tendency in art that undeniably exists. This tendency needs greater explication (I completely disagree with Pocaro in this regard) and more criticism. In a sense, I want people like Butler and Pocaro to be in a dialogue, and by dialogue I mean a civilized, learned bare-knuckles brawl. This probably means people curating shows of this kind of work with the explicit intent of showing casualist paintings, followed by vigorous criticism that is unafraid to to attack the premises. I want to see a critical language to talk about this work evolve.

Four Painters

Robert Boyd

Pop-up shows drive me crazy. You blink and you miss it. And the policy of this blog is primarily to write about shows our readers can see, not shows that happened in the past. It's an expression of humility, believe it or not. We want to say to the reader, here's what we thought, but go see it for yourself. So pop-up shows, which almost by definition can't be reviewed before they're done, are frustrating.

New Paintings by Brandon, Dylan, Guillaume and Isaiah at the MAS Gallery (studio 227) at the Spring Street Studios is a pop-up show. But fortunately, it is lasting more than one day. I saw it Saturday. If you want, you can see it Wednesday between 1 and 5 pm.

Brandon Araujo is a painter about whom I've written recently. The work in this show isn't substantially different from the work in the previous show. He still likes taking a texture and spraypainting it to exaggerate its surface.

 
Brandon Araujo, Untitled, 2013

But Araujo doesn't stick to one technique. As a painter, he's like a clothes shopper, trying on different suits in different styles. Whether he will settle on one is the question, but for now it means we can go from a spray-paint on plaster production to a heavily impasto painting like the one below.


Brandon Araujo, Untitled, 2013

The super-creamy horizontal application of paint reminded me a little of Nick Kersulis' paintings from his recent show at Devin Borden. It's almost like cake icing.

 
Brandon Araujo, Untitled, 2013

And this piece reminded of some of the recent Jeff Elrods I saw at Texas Gallery. The only commom traits of Araujo's paintings are their black, white and grey palettes and the fact that they are abstractions. I'm not going to say he needs to settle down on one style--I quite liked the variety--but he needs to find his own voice. I liked what I saw here a lot, though. I think Araujo is an artist to watch.

 
Dylan Roberts, I.S.Y.B.N.O.T.I., 2103

Dylan Roberts is someone I had known previously as a painter of highly colorful, highly painterly works. And in I.S.Y.B.N.O.T.I., there is the remnant of something quite colorful, peeking through a large field of white. It's almost as if he is embarrassed by his earlier self, the Philip Guston-like architecture of paint. I don't quite get it--I liked that earlier iteration. But artists gotta evolve.

 
Dylan Roberts, O.S.O., 2013

And that evolution can include figuration, as in O.S.O. Roberts pasts a crude drawing of a rather upset-looking face on top of what appears to be a larger painted version of the face.


Guillaume Gelot, Green (left) and Cat Dreams (right), 2013

They say you should paint what you like, which suggests that Guillaume Gelot likes pussy. Two of his four paintings in the show focus on that area of anatomy. Cat Dreams is an abstracted beaver shot.


Guillaume Gelot, Wet Flowers (left) and Brown (right), 2013

Wet Flowers is a bit more demure.  In both cases, the subject is dehumanized by the focus only on the genitalia. They have the subtlety of bathroom stall art. And humorously, they are paired with two fairly severe abstractions. It's as if Gelot is saying that your puritan, minimal, intellectual abstract artworks are no different from the scrawls of horny teenagers. It's a theory I'm willing to entertain.


Isaiah López, Untitled and Untitled, 2013

Isaiah López's paintings feel pretty similar to some of Araujo's, except that he adds a color to each one. I'm also reminded a bit of Nathan Green's paintings.


Isaiah López, Untitled, 2013

Which is to say that while I found the work pretty likable, it didn't bowl me over with its originality. I don't know how old  López is, but if he's a young artist, I'd call this work a good start. It's enough to make me want to see more. I like the way the paint is applied (and scraped off?). He achieves some interesting visual effects.

All in all, I found this exhibit pretty enjoyable. I don't know where these artists are going next, but they've all interested me enough to follow along.

Pan Recommends for the week of July 25 to July 31

Robert Boyd

It's not quite the dog days of summer, but with triple digit temperatures, things are slowing down in Houston considerably. The events below are just about everything happening this weekend as far as art goes (I may have missed something--if I did, feel free to mention it in the comments). Fortunately, it all looks pretty fun--fun enough to brave the soul-crushing heat to see!

FRIDAY

 
my autographed copy of Do It: The Compendium

Do It: Houston with Regina Agu, Debra Barrera, Caleb Churchill, Joseph Cohen, Jamal Cyrus, Jack Eriksson, David Feil, Lauren Moya Ford, Joseph Havel, Rachel Hecker, Katy Heinlein, Otis Ike, Jang Soon Im, Erin Joyce, Autumn Knight, Cody Ledvina, Massa Lemu, Gabriel Martinez, Ayanna Jolivet McCloud, Senalka Mcdonald, Madsen Minax, Mari Omori, Mark Harold Ponder, Davide Savorani, Carrie Marie Schneider, Patrick Turk, and Ronnie Yates, organized by Max Fields and Olivia Junell at Alabama Song, 6 to 9 pm. Do It celebrates the 25th anniversary of Hans Ulrich Obrist's Do It project and the recent publication of the Do It: The Compendium. I'm mainly curious to see Alabama Song (with a name like that, they better have a whiskey bar). They have an Indie Go Go campaign going right now, and I want to see this show before I decide whether or not to contribute!

Salon des Refusés 2013, part 2, with Magdalena Abrego, Megan Badger, Nicole Bean, N. Blanca, Cherie Bright, Aaron Castro, Diane Fraser, Quinn Hagood, Sarah Hamilton, Jane B. Honovich, Luke Ikard, David Letchford, Rebecca Lowe, Jonathan Lowe, Yma Luis, Michael Mallory, Penny McDonald, Adrienne Meyers, Eric Ockrassa, Kati Ozanic-Lemberger, Annette K. Palmer, Tony Parana, Tara Ratliff, Peggy Sexton, Caleb Sims, Karen Smith, Joelle Verstraeten, Joyce Matula Welch and Jo Zider at BLUEorange, 6 pm. This is week 2 of BLUEorange's four week series of pop-up exhibits of artists who failed to get selected for the Big Show at Lawndale.

SATURDAY


Denise Prince, Warm Grape Soda, photograph on acrylic, 5 x 5 inches

The 5th annual Visual Stimulus Package at GGallery, open for viewing at 11 am and then for buying at 6 pm. Apama Mackey's annual pop-up show of inexpensive artworks by well-known Houston artists is back. All art is either $50, $100 or $200. This show usually has some great stuff, and the prices are unbeatable.


Tod Bailey, Hide Out, 2013, oil on canvas, 70 x 65 inches

Open, an Artists Studio Event with Tod Bailey, Karim Alston and Richard Garcia at Summer Street Studios, 3 pm to 9 pm. Three painters show their work in this show organized by Jay Wehnert of Intuitive Eye.


A piece by Dylan Roberts

New Paintings by Brandon, Dylan, Guillaume and Isaiah (i.e., Brandon Araujo, Dylan Roberts, Guillaume Gelot and Isaiah López) at the MAS Exhibition Space at Spring Street Studios, 6 to 10 pm. The ever-evolving Montrose Art Society has some new young members apparently--it should be a show worth checking out.

WEDNESDAY

 
Julon Pinkston, Shirtless, Young and Catching Flesh, 2013, acrylic on wood panel, 10 x 7 x 2 inches

The Big Slide Show Artist talk: July 31 and August 1, 6–7 pm each night at Lawndale Art Center. Every year, Lawndale gives its Big Show artists an opportunity to talk about their work. This talk is split over two nights--Wednesday's talk features John Adelman , Kari Breitigam Adrian Landon Brooks, Felipe Contreras, Jennifer Ellison, Avril Falgout, Luna Gajdos, Jeremy Keas, Galina Kurlat, Melinda Laszczynski, David McClain, Susannah Mira, Julon Pinkston, Eduardo Portillo, Kay Sarver, John Slaby, Alexine O. Stevens and Martin Wnuk.


Jim Nolan window thingy

Window into Houston: Jim Nolan shifting SCALE at 110 Milam St., 8 to 10 pm. Even though the new improved Blaffer Museum is complete, they are continuing their fun series of window exhibits downtown, this time with Mr. Matter-of-Fact himself, sculptor Jim Nolan.

Villagomez, Roberts & Martinez at the Joanna

Robert Boyd


Miguel Martinez, I Knew You Were No Angel

Is there a trend among painters to think of painting itself--the spreading of gooey colored media onto a surface--as unnecessary? I can't tell if I knew You Were no Angel by Miguel Martinez is actually painted or not. But it feels like a painting. (Tellingly, the hand-written list of work provided by the Joanna, which is hosting an exhibit by Ana Villagomez, Dylan Roberts and Miguel Martinez,  provides no information about the media of the pieces.)

Maybe painting/not painting is not really an issue for these artists. Many artists working today feel no particular loyalty to a given medium, and given the amazing variety of stuff that one can make things out of, medium doesn't seem like all that important or interesting category. It's just as good to go to Home Depot, Radio Shack and 99¢ Only for art supplies as Texas Art Supply. I am going to assume that the silvery foam around the edge of I Knew You Were No Angel did not come from an art supply store (but who knows?).


Miguel Martinez, Good Girl Gone Bad

But it's important to me to have some idea whether to think of Good Girl Gone Bad as a painting or not. The tradition of painting is so rich, so powerful. It was the primary visual art of the Western world for centuries. So my feeling is to think of these artworks as paintings. Some of them just barely, though.


Miguel Martinez, Same Park, Different Trailer

For example, Same Park, Different Trailer features 10 painting-like objects attached to a garden lattice. They each look like an abstract design on stretched canvas. But when you look closely, you realize that these are pieces of printed fabric wrapped on canvas stretchers. They aren't painted, but they pay homage to painting in their form and appearance. They are in the same trailer park, but in a different trailer. (Painting's got the super-fancy doublewide furthest away from the septic tank.)


Ana Villagomez, Easier For

Ana Villagomez, at least, is usually clear about what she is doing. Easier For is not a painting. Instead, it's a kind of collage. The phrase is meaningless by itself--it seems to have been taken out of the middle of a sentence, perhaps Matthew 19:24: "And again I say unto you, It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God." The way it's portrayed is like a it of recorded speech repeated so that it becomes rhythm, as in a Steve Reich tape loop piece.  The meaning it may have had (or at least implied) gets lost in the course of repetition. If it does refer to Matthew 19:24, it may be a commentary about how this radical message gets softened through repetition.


Ana Villagomez, Arthur Drawings

That said, Villagomez does display a variety of paintings of the cartoon character Arthur, each slightly different (the differences seem to be variations in skill and degrees of finish).


Ana Villagomez, Cat Paw

Of course, if there is anything contemporary art has taught us about painting, it's that you don't have to paint it yourself. Outsourcing in painting is just as legitimate as outsourcing in manufacturing. With Cat's Paw, it seems that Villagomez has (perhaps) outsourced her painting to her cat.


(in front) Dylan Roberts, 3 untitled paintings; (behind them) Ana Villagomez, Large Trash Bag and Medium Trash Bag

Dylan Roberts is the most painterly painter of the group--he doesn't appear to be playing any conceptual games with his paintings (but without knowing his process, one can't be certain). The question I had seeing this arrangement of Villagomez's photographic trash bags on the wall with Robert's paintings hanging in front, was this a function of the Joann's limited space, or was this a deliberate statement about painting vs. non-painting. The paintings have a strong presence, floating in front of the trash bags, their colors are brilliant in contrast to the black and white trash bags. Their placement almost reads like a vote in favor of the continued importance of painting. (This thesis would not work if the paintings were terrible. They are crude and bizarrely colored, but they sneak up on you in the same way Nathan Green's paintings do. Roberts' painting shares some qualities with Green's and Cordy Ryman's.)


Miguel Martinez, What did I say about going into Georgie's room? 

Miguel Martinez is the artist who skates the painting/not painting boundary closest. I could claim that that's why I like his work best of the three artists, but to be honest, I think it's because the colors appeal to me most.



Miguel Martinez, Cry Me a River, Tears on My Pillow

Because once you get past thorny concerns of liminality or deskilling, and once you acknowledge that as a viewer, you are little more than a cloud of cultural, psychological and neurological biases, you are left with visual appeal. That's what worked on me at the end. I liked Villagomez and Roberts and especially Martinez because in my eyes, this work looked good.