From October 24 thru November 2009

 

 

 

 

 

“Sorry Friend, This Is No Hemorrhoids ;-{o>” is a collaborative project that involves a game of painterly taunting and one-upmanship between four friends who explore the tragic-comedy of the sublime human condition. In their respective work, each painter confronts the issue of minor narratives pertaining to abject existence, the exorcism of cultural idiosyncrasy, off-color jokes as subversive social strategy, and the formation of an alternate language that critiques the hierarchy of class, taste, and the curse of identity aesthetics as a career move.

 

The exhibit presents a variety of painterly mishaps deployed as majestic flourishes, wayward visual puns turning into garish insults, tactical stylistic retorts to gain celebrity status through the exploitation of labor by others; and miscellaneous miserable apologies to make the collaborative act a socially accepted practice in contemporary art, as a way of dressing the fact that the end product is usually a work of cryptic meaning available primarily for a paying bourgeois clientele. Together these artists collaborate, or cook, an arcane recipe involving ingredients cannibalized from the reliquaries of profane illumination by a living MerzBuddha. This group therapy applies the standard of messing up one’s agonized craft by another conspirator in an effort to release that individual suffering to a transcendental letting go of the ego, at the same time pervaded with the secret glee of schadenfreude (laughing at someone’s “aesthetic” misfortune) occurring on each lovingly painted detail that flirts to be stripped bare by these inflamed studio bachelors. Each session turns into a strategy of spacing from its territorial origin developing into a war of colonial conquests and marked identities, like a dog leaving behind a trail of its presence for the other dogs to follow or evade (territorialization/deterritorialization/re-territorialization). Through it all, what emerges is an abstract picture of comic non-sequiturs that only a deus ex machina could save or forgive, for the unspeakable content in the pictureless picture cannot be defined but can only be imaginatively complimented with an otherworldly laughter, or better yet, shared with a sublime corporal narrative concerning a liberated but acrimonious gas.