THE BUSINESS OF ART

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The portrait is one of the traditional fundaments of Western painting since the Renaissance. Its psychological as well as aesthetic hold on us, of course, stems in great part from its concern with other human beings, beings recognizable or made recognizable to us in reposed but dramatic fashion. The camera has displaced the canvas as the repository for the “true” (supposedly indexical) image, but that has only freed up latter-day portrait painters to let their powers of imagination and rendition run wild.In this respect Clayton Mitropoulos has been running wild for a long time, and shows no signs of stopping. 

Mitropoulos’ people, harking from all over the world, tug at our fascination with and fear of the stranger. The artist makes the Other at once more and less other, endowing his buzzy peoploids with infectious energy and vaguely recognizable features. But who are these endearing creatures? They are as cute as pets but they’re clearly civilized. They evince regional fashion – now Asian, now Caucasian, now Latin, now African – without self-consciousness or condescension. (It’s a small world after all.) They display a reassuring, even infectious playfulness, seemingly joking about their situation(s) and about the audience’s slow-wittedness. The mocking is gentle. The humanity is what counts. 

The world Clayton Mitropoulos assembles from a globeful of sorta-humans is our world reflected back at us – a portrait of a species, but with its nastiest edges honed.

Peter Frank, Los Angeles.

January 2024

Scotch Hopkins is a man of many hands and of many appearances. For one line of work he must reinvent himself every day. For another, he must be ready to crisis-solve at every moment. For yet another he must create and re-create a visual language that changes all of a sudden, like some fast-moving inner city patois. Well, maybe it is.  Hopkins’ visual art evinces a sense of formal and symbolic complexity - one that in its expansive and indulgent color and familiar themes eases its way reassuringly into your consciousness. The stories he tells and the characters he conjures are recognizable from contemporary life, indeed from our shared imagination; and from that adolescent street-tagger ethos comes a comfort with crudity, or at least with the direct, unsophisticated gruffness that demarcates today’s cultural loci. By turning us away from the imposing existential inquiries they hint at, and toward a fresher, sunnier gestalt, Hopkins reassures us of the world’s goodness even as he keeps the world’s failures top of mind. The struggle is not between good an evil, but between cynicism and bravery.

Peter Frank, International art critic, curator and poet

Los Angeles 

October 2023

 

LANCE CHANG: RÊVES DE BALLET

By Peter Frank

More than most art forms, the art of the ballet, steeped in a highly formalized tradition of almost ritualistic storytelling, resists personalized interpretation and eccentric reformulation. Renegade radicals like Sergei Diaghilev and Isadora Duncan may have advanced boundary-shattering approaches, but rather than enter the balletic mainstream these inventions engendered a whole new, parallel category, modern dance. To this day, the ballet per se comprises a procession of gestures and costumes unchanged from Petipa’s day. 

Such an orthodox mode of performance, when regarded from the vantage of another art, invites a peculiarly intense reinterpretation -- certainly of the kind Lance Chang proffers in his painterly, metamorphic photographs. In Chang’s fluid, even molten images, the ballerina -- as often as not solo, as if dreaming the experience – fuses with her environment. That environment seems itself alive, organic, breathing and heaving with the efforts of the dancer at once to escape and to fuse with it.  

In Chang’s charged apparitions, the dancer, as W. B. Yeats would have it, has become one with the dance. So has the landscape. So has your perception. These are no mere documents of performance, nor even choreographic interpretations; they are fever dreams that unlock the transformative power of ballet, exposing the carnal, epicurean, erotic force that drives all dance and which ballet seeks to harness – but not tame. The camera art of Lance Chang unleashes  emotion behind the motion, sensation that has waited in the wings for liberation.

Peter Frank, International art critic, curator and poet

Los Angeles 

April 2023