#mark roth

August 26 - September 28, 2018

A writer, Sarah Hombach has recently plunged into painting as a means to explore arenas of experience where the insufficiency of words can be glaring. Compelled by the language of gesture, the figures that populate Sarah’s work represent “a means of embodying a certain feeling or interpersonal phenomena.” Because they are depicted from an emotional standpoint, representing “how the body is experienced from the inside,” the figures are liberated to inhabit impossible anatomies and express themselves in potentially fantastic gestures. Influenced by Medieval art and its emphasis on frontality, Hombach explores awkwardness and the inability of people to occupy the idealized position many painters put them in. This concern arises out of the experience of her particular body and perceived sense of strangeness. In this way her painting practice functions as a tool of self-acceptance for herself and the viewer, proffering the vision of “a joyful exalted awkward person.”

Artist Alexis Ayala’s paintings are respectfully informed by the values of graffiti that inspired him during his formative years growing up on the West Coast. Lex’s aesthetic is grounded in a love for streetwear and fashion along with his Mexican heritage. Ayala’s studio practice is one of developing intimately meaningful iconography that is resonant to streetwear’s strategy of reshuffling cultural signifiers. These new works represent a straddling between typography and easel painting’s concerns, stretching to embrace inclusion of brushy gesture and depictions of illusionistic depth. Hands, apples, eyes, cigarettes and letters comprise an expanding universe and grammar of the artist’s narrative. By bridging graphic portrayal and painterly expression, the work fuses the dual strains of typography and Abstract Expressionism – doing so with a bit of sign painter’s labor thrown in to acknowledge and embody the virtue of craft.

Mark Roth’s newest paintings find inspiration in the cryptozoological artifact of blobsquatches – a blobsquatch being the indeterminate blob in a photograph that a keen-eyed observer ascertains is a visual capture of Sasquatch. Generally they take the form of forest views with a circle drawing one’s attention to the purported creature. Roth States:

“I find the resilience of Bigfoot to be compelling. I believe it speaks to the persistent yearning to see primordial nature staring back at us in a form analogous to our own. I love the thought of a person scouring photographs to verify that the world still contains the unknown awaiting discovery. It’s the yearning of blobsquatches that I find so moving. For me this is encapsulated not so much in the blurry purported Sasquatch but in the encircling line drawing attention to the creature. The circle is the essential component of the blobsquatch for it represents the culmination of careful scrutiny and an urgency to share the benefits of passionate looking. So, with this as inspiration, I dedicated myself to the search for evidence of Sasquatch in the paintings of The Met.”

Included here are faithfully replicated passages from Dosso Dossi and Balthus that incontrovertibly capture a Sasquatch “tree peak” and a striding Squatch in a posture akin to that of frame 352 in the famous Patterson-Gimlin Bigfoot film of 1967. The encircling line repeats so that the composition assumes a target shape, utilizing the notion that the bullseye represents an apogee of yearning - in this case to strike a connection with primordial painters in the wilderness of art and its making.

Mark Roth