Talking art
Welcome to my art talk blog.
2-25-2025 - I stopped by Frieze LA art fair last week, and I want to highlight just three artists out of the dozens that I looked at.
Tomokazu Matsuyama featured painting at Frieze LA art fair
First: Tomokazu Matsuyama. His canvases are painted with acrylics only, and what a dazzling, fun party they are. I love the art history references such as the Henri Rousseau’s “The Dream” outside the window, or the Georgia O’Keefe on the wall. This is a world I would want to live in, and I would be thrilled if I could have one of Tomokazu’s works on the wall of my living room. Prices started at $150K, with my favorite piece being $500K and sold to a museum in Japan I believe.
Second: Gajin Fujita. Angelic Intervention is a playful satiric take on consumerism and addiction to gaming and media. Love it. Was priced $150K, size 48” x 60”
Gajin Fujita painting at Frieze LA, “Angelic Intervention”
Third: Lauren Quin. I loved the vibrant explosion of color in “the Font of Renewal” the color of which reminded me of a jumbled up James Rosenquist. Would love any of these in my living room!
Lauren Quin, Font of Renewal, oil on canvas, 72” x 120”
3-5-2025 - Beauty and Truth. Taylor Morrison (the popular @weopen art commentator on Instagram) said in response to some of my art that it was too beautiful. He didn’t express it that way, but he started by highlighting a painting that had strong abstract elements and he liked it because it was “ugly,” and said that there was a false equivalence between truth and beauty.
Taylor Morrison: “Going after beauty is not the thing.... I think maybe it was Plato’s fault, connecting beauty and truth together. Beauty isn’t always true. It’s just as true as ugly. Anyway, each invididual has their own understanding of what is beautiful and what is ugly. No one is going to agree.”
Here are some of my off-the-cuff thoughts about Taylor’s comments on the connection between beauty and art and truth.
I know that in modern art, probably since Cezanne and Picasso started abstraction and cubism as a painterly style, ugliness has been considered the aesthetic attitude and subject that best conveys “truth.”
This commonly accepted assumption of ugliness being closer to “Truth” has been deemed the right path for modern artists, along with the constant pursuit of being original and discovering some new approach to art (the end game of which has been Maurizio Cattalan’s “Comedian” which is a real-life banana duct- taped to a white wall). The quest for originality ends in making art a joke, with some existential conundrum attached to it that gives it meaning.
The depreciation of Beauty (with a capital B) in art also happened because of the advent of photography, which displaced the need for artists to depict the world realistically since photos could do that so easily. By having some traditional expressions of beauty in my paintings, I am bucking against that artistic tenet that good contemporary art must be ugly. I think beauty is a valid point of focus in paintings. But it has to be in an interesting context. If I depict a beautiful person or object or landscape, I’ll want to juxtapose it with some other element that creates a psychological tension or conflict. With that conflict, I seek to capture the complexity of life and the many facets of reality that are co-existing in the world around us and in ourselves. Beauty to me is one of those facets. Beauty is boring when it’s by itself, and we have been overexposed to that in the media, fashion photos, and on the internet. But it can be interesting in the right context, and can have emotional power again. My own love of beauty goes back to childhood memories of my beautiful mother, and visits to museums as a kid, loving Titian’s depiction of Venus or Ingres’ Grand Odalisque.
Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres’s La Grande Odalisque, 1814
