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Cartoon in a Cartoon Graveyard at Super Dutchess

February 16, 2020

Artists: Alex Kovacs, Fernando Pintado, Craig Taylor

Exhibition title: Cartoon in a Cartoon Graveyard

Venue: Super Dutchess, New York, US

Date: January 6 – February 23, 2020

Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artists and Super Dutchess, New York

“Don’t want to end up a cartoon in a cartoon graveyard” -Paul Simon, “You can call me Al”

Al isn’t the only one concerned about the reification trap. Ending up a cartoon in a cartoon graveyard is a poetic fear, one of self-alienation and disassociation. It is a material and uncanny reification, one that is vaguely Marxist: to recognize yourself essentialized mid-process. This fear prompted David Joselit to define Transitive Painting as a reactionary force to this self-cartoonization of the artist in his essay “Painting Beside Itself.” Building off of Kippenberger’s realization that all painting exists within (and must be understood through) a network composed of the history of painting and its systems of commodification and exchange, Joselit outlined a kind of painting that attempted to acknowledge this exchange, history, and circulation through its process; painting with hopes to avoid the cartoon graveyard.

This exhibition examines the embrace of this graveyard, it finds its liberatory path out of it through the creation of image objects. It is a show of paintings with shapes that become solid and command a sculptural, material form in our mind, much like the episode of The Simpsons “Homer Cubed” when Homer goes through the third dimension and winds up a “real” figure that walks into an erotic cake shop in LA. However, it is also a show of works that create cutouts, through graphic shapes, in a way that carves through the surface like Wile E. Coyote’s train tunnel gag. Alex Kovacs, Fernando Pintado, and Craig Taylor each work with a form of representation and abstraction that wrestles with itself, and yearns to describe something phenomenological as well as pictorial. Each of them have felt the itch of the sculptural, having created literal objects that bring the hidden images of their paintings into the erotic cake shop of the studio; materializing the image into form like Felix the Cat clocks.

Alex Kovacs (b. 1992) graduated from Goucher College in 2014 with a degree in Studio Art focusing on printmaking and spent a year at the Glasgow School of Art in Scotland between 2012-13. He recently had his first solo show at Resort Gallery in Baltimore titled Endless Vessel during the summer of 2019. He currently lives and works in Burlington, VT.

Craig Taylor received his BFA from Maine College of Art and his MFA from Yale University. He has had solo shows at Sue Scott Gallery in New York, March Gallery in New York, La Montagne Gallery in Boston, Test: Showroom, Berlin and CB1 Gallery in Los Angeles. He has been included in numerous group exhibitions at various galleries among them CTRL Gallery, Houston, Texas; 106 Greene, Brooklyn, New York; Bakalar and Paine Galleries, Massachusetts College of Art, Boston; and Fred [London], Leipzig. His work has been reviewed in Art in America, Time Out New York, The Boston Globe, and The New York Sun. Based in Brooklyn, New York, Taylor is an Associate Professor of Painting and the Graduate Program Director at the Rhode Island School of Design.

Fernando Pintado (b. 1982, San Juan, PR) lives and works in New York, NY. Recent solo exhibitions have been presented at No Place Gallery, Columbus, OH (2018); La Productora, San Juan, PR (2015); Chemi Room, San Juan, PR (2012); Roberto Paradise, San Juan, PR (2011); and Galería Comercial, San Juan, PR (2007, 2006). Notable group exhibitions have been presented at Sculpture Center, Long Island City, NY (2018); Embajada, San Juan, PR (2019); Miscelania, Barcelona, Spain (2019); Fresh Window Gallery, Brooklyn, NY (2017); Josh Lilley Gallery, London (2012); Nuevo Museo Energía de Arte Contemporáneo Buenos Aires, Argentina (2011); Proyectos Ultravioleta, Guatemala City, Guatemala (2010); Residencies include The Vermont Studio Center (2015); Pintado has been the recipient of the Charles G. Shaw Award Saul Lyons Memorial Scholarship, Brooklyn College, Brooklyn, NY (2013); and the Arnaldo Roche Foundation Award for Painting, San Juan, PR (2002). His work is in notable collections, including the Peggy Cooper Cafritz Collection, Washington, D.C.; Donald Baechler Collection, New York, NY; and the César and Mima Reyes Collection, San Juan, PR.