Could you help me with that?
Foreword. A set of eight paintings executed by New York-based artist Daniel Graham Loxton in various locations (including Italy) between 2022 and 2025 is presented at Triangolo as Loxton’s first solo exhibition with the gallery. What follows is a sort of quasi-hypnotic stream of consciousness guided by the artist himself. The first phrase of each paragraph should help the reader in finding the work in question. Otherwise feel free to ask please. Reading each block with the proper work in front of you is recommended, not mandatory.
Green vertical stripe on the left side. Trend Machine (title). A book: The Elements of Style by William Strinck Jr. (1920). Dan is not interested in the text itself, but in the way it was written, now out of date. Revealed within the text is the word white. Text is upside down. It speaks about the political Zeitgeist. Deconstruction of painting in itself, or a set of rules no longer here. There’s layers and layers of slow drying oil medium. Like gasoline. Two separate forms that do not coalesce. Brushy forms. Things that make sense when you return to a specific period of time in American painting. “It’s not Maga, it’s not maga please”. Certain abstract religiosity. This brush is expressing inner feelings.
Soviet Union era found folder with plastic elements. References to Jasmine Gregory on American excess. “We make fun of the puerilism of the American political system.” A stupid article about the birth of tortellini in Italy. Found image glued and overpainted in Leonardo’s sfumato style (obviously for an American audience). Tortellini tourism. Title: Tortellini. Plastic elements are also found objects. Enigmatic objects, black and white. He found them on the sidewalk while walking. They’re glued over the oil painting (reversed from the image of the tortellini). It has the look of pasta… industrial tortellini. You don’t know what is inside the folder, but below the folder is a layer of oil painting from another canvas. “Green parts as green onions to be cooked, somewhere.”
The blue with the stick on the edge. A radiography. If you turn it upside down you can see the lighting of a party. And figures of people at the party. Dan took that photo at a friend’s wedding. Blue and white interact. It’s about a painting process reversing into a photographic one. “The blue pigment is a precious one. It’s about purity. Not being affected by other paintings.” The image has a pregnant woman turned upside down, obscured by the blue pigment. Renaissance Venetian Madonna. Dots evoking lights, or stars in a Medieval baptistery chapel. The stick addresses perspective. Wood adds a feeling of contractive space. Painting, operations. Architecture is like love, which is a big construction based on words. Architecture is like love and art.
The yellow one. Title: The yellow dove? Metal elements are part of the above mentioned Soviet Union folder, a kind of armature for it. Very delicate pencil marks lie on the surface.
Patch of intense yellow near the baby blue plastic robin’s egg. “It has the shape of a cracked egg. It’s damaged. It’s not virgin anyway.” A small footprint above the white paper. Something walked across the canvas. Pencil ON paper. A partial note. “Something done quickly.” Dan doesn’t remember. Where the two metal pieces meet… a scissor, a compass, an angle. “You can get trapped in it. It goes out into space.” Flat to the canvas. Everything is secured and flat. There is a shadow behind the robin’s egg. “Accidentally” a silhouette of a bird appears on the canvas.
Obscuring areas by a white collar on a rolling chair. Title: The Dog With the Strongest Grip. Section around the man’s foot. Layering of paint above the photograph, with the found wood object. Paint, found object, photograph, paint. Four layers. Bureaucratic office space. Do you remember the Soviet Union folder? Gripping the side of the chair. “From afar it’s a very formal abstract painting.” The man wears a proper shirt. Vertebrae. The uncomfortable position of sitting all day on a chair. Hands like the head of a peacock or pink flamingo.
Florentine Paper. “Leo and Ludo want it to be a central piece in the show.” Found right outside of the gallery. Dan opened the drawer, cut the paper and brought it to the studio in Pontevico, near Cremona. Little piece of hardware is the clue. Three axes in the painting expand into a component of a larger piece of furniture. A very classic surface to work on. Repetition vs. freedom of the painting, dripping, a rag, moving paint around with paper, no fingers this time. That’s a bit of a Beat (thanks Allen!) green and blue organic ambiance. Outdoor and indoor. The part and the whole. The world outside and ongoing relationships inside. Home. Partners. Families. The wheel was originally there. The paper was already glued to the panel. Suggesting, instead of affirming. “Painting and the found surface are collaborating, not competing.” Could you help me with that?
–Stefano Pirovano
