Todd Bienvenu Opens at Trestle Gallery Tomorrow Night

Todd Bienvenu, Pure Class, 2014, oil on canvas, 52.5 x 46.5 inches
Image courtesy of Life on Mars Gallery

Todd Bienvenu is in Long Story Short at Trestle Gallery with Nicholas Borelli, Katherine Bradford, Hilary Doyle, Kenny Rivero, and Halley Zien.

April 2 – May 8, 2015
Opening tomorrow April 2, 7-9PM.

Trestle Gallery, 168 7th Street, Brooklyn, NY 11215

Kang Hoodoo

A Note on Zulu Painting.

As it happens I have an appreciable Zulu painting by Todd Bienvenu now hanging in the stairwell of a Park Slope double-wide. It is a brown and creamy splotch of a thing, with lots of subtle greens and blues, and it goes with the colors of the brownstone. It looks as if a house painter used the canvas for cleaning brushes, and left some of his own thoughts as well. A wonderful wipeout of a painting, full of deft brushwork and slights of hand.

Todd Bienvenu, Stooges, 2013

Stooges, by Todd Bienvenu, deserves a great foyer in a Brooklyn mansion somewhere. It's fitting for reception areas, a mischievous "whatever" with a humorous tone. Cool and welcoming, and tasteful. Brownish and creamy shit-colors and throwaway chicken guts comport beautifully with the patina of any distressed hardwood interior in the borough. It is a painting that lends itself to furniture, as furnishing, for the location, for the occasion. A polite, decorative painting, and also snapped like a table cloth from under a banquet. Exceedingly well juggled, and all wrapped up in a mud-ball of brownish baroque. Just a big beautiful rumpus of a painting that doesn't care what you think.

It was serendipity that just as I finished installing this painting in the Greco-Victorian hallway of the building, there appeared Basquiat and the Bayou at some "Confederate Museum" in New Orleans.

In that moment it hit me like a coconut on the head ... that there really is such a thing as zombie painting, or voodoo, or Zulu painting, whatever you want to call it. It is a subculture in painting that excels at what an art critic might euphemistically call "canceling maneuvers" or "abject expressions of defiance or refusal" or simply "insouciance."

Jean-Michel Basquiat, King Zulu, 1986

Robert St. Brice (20th cent. Haitian) signed, oil on board, Voodoo face, 29" x 25"
Robert St. Brice was one of the very few first generation Haitian painters
who was totally unique. His brand of voodoo expressionism straight from his psyche
is totally unique and powerful. So much so he was the inspiration or father
of the Saint Soleil genre that is in such demand today,
but still no one painted like St. Brice. From this website.

Stooges, Installation View

Todd Bienvenu's work is by no means limited to the zombie theme, he's not some goth obsessive. He is better known for his lurid scenes of American life, wrestling, girls, beer culture, and so on. We just happen to have a few gems at the gallery from his earlier and more abstract zombie phase. "Stooges" is looking for placement in a top-notch residence anywhere in the city. "Spitfire" is a high note in Bienvenu's zombie period. In one bullseye after another his work covers an ample range of human experiences and foibles.

Todd Bienvenu, Spitfire, 2013

Todd Bienvenu, Spitfire, 2013, Detail

Two years of Todd Bienvenu in Bushwick is already a national treasure, a pristine document in style and place of a reviled and envied hepitude. Bienvenu's world is usually presented as an allegory, where the "great white trash" of America stands in for a pastural meditation, like an old dixie rococo painting, upon what is really a complex urban life. Since my gallery has a history with this painter, I can only say we are soon to be safely in the dust of his career, I'm sure. This painting, Stooges, is that dust perhaps. It is a premier brownstone hallway painting, a glorious splotch, stylishly replete with astringent maneuvers in abstraction and figuration. The painting is all cancellations and cross-outs, a lateral dive across language ... with zombies. And it coheres, it hangs together in its localized drama, and in its very human stain as painting.

Stooges, Installation View

Donald Baechler, Untitled ("globe"), 1984

A brutal moment leaves a skid mark on the document of painting. Donald Baechler and Rick Prol may not have been zombie painters, or they may have been at one time or another, I don't know. They might as well have been, I don't care. By zombie painting I do not just mean some special instance of outsider folk art. Rather, I mean the insult carried from outsider folk art into the avant-garde, as a deliberate strategy. This dodge does not come only under the sign of the zombie. Though it comes often enough under that motif, it is really one of several related strategies that pertain to art as resistance.

Several painters in the East Village in the 1980s detected a fault line between the "visual culture" of the postmodernists, and the "visuality" that was preferred by the old school painters. They tore up that fault line. They decided to insult painters and conceptualists in one go. Hoodoo painting is one example of this trend from the strange afternoon of the East Village scene. Strong icons are needed to rattle the cage of painting, and there is nothing in the universe of aesthetic experience quite like the rooster-strut of a Haitian or a Bayou zombie. It is a treasured vernacular of the American continent.

Rick Prol, I Have This Cat, 1985, acrylic on canvas, wood, and glass, 96 x 93 in.

"If painting is dead, well then, here's a painting of a zombie."

— Todd Bienvenu, 2013

This, by the way, is zombie criticism. It has no real existence. I represent Todd Bienvenu, I sell his work. And so of course I like it. Obviously I am a big fan. You may call this is an advertisement. All the same, important announcements about the artist are in order. Someone must note that Todd Bienvenu is teaching in Louisiana right now, just as the Basquiat "bayou paintings" go on exhibit there. 

John d'Addario in his piece in Hyperallergic informs us that the Mississippi had a powerful imaginative influence on Basquiat, a Brooklynite of Haitian and Puerto Rican parentage whose actual experience of the US South was limited. Todd Bienvenu comes from Louisiana with Cajun roots. And these two American painters bare comparison, I submit, and have said in the past, in that each is a trenchantly original painter of zombies.

Zombie aesthetics are folk art entangled in the ganglion of fine art. The zombie is the atavistic feature of a discourse; the twitching of the insensate. It is the chicken man in Blue Velvet. It serves to rend the wall of intelligibility. What Basquiat and Bienvenu, and Prol and Baechler do is to acknowledge unintelligibility in art. The painting is the document of a mistake, and the artist is ready to abandon art as the critics do. That is, in haste, with Adorno, and just as readily. And I like a painting that has no scruples about such things.

— Ethan Pettit, 31 October 2014

Todd Bienvenu, Zombie Apocalypse, 2013

Inventory and Prices for Todd Bienvenu
Artist's profile on this site
artist's website
The Gatorman Cometh – portrait of the artist as a young zombie, May 2013
more on Bienvenu in our gallery notebook 2014

I'm the only hell my mama ever raised

The thing I love about this painting, is that we have a girl who is sixteen? Absolutely beautiful and stubborn white trash. She already knows she doesn't have to live here. She knows she can waltz out into the big world any day and get plenty for what she's got. That's not the problem. The problem for her at this point is just how to make the first move.

I'm the only hell my mama ever raised, Todd Bienvenu, 2014

Full House East - Reception This Friday

Our long-running group show was initiated by David Rich and Paulette Myers-Rich in St Paul Minnesota back in July as Full House West. The show migrated to our gallery in Park Slope Brooklyn in early September, and it will remain up until November 2nd.

Todd Bienvenu at Life on Mars on Friday

Constellations, 2013, at Life on Mars

The specter of false consciousness still haunts the art world. New art stars are still received either with mawkish tones of hope or with a Bronx cheer. For thirty years we have been snared in this ambivalent jag. Criticism takes refuge in elaborate workarounds and risorgimenti. Brooklyn takes truckloads of guff for truckloads of hubris. And very few painters have been able to crack this mess open and splay it out as deliciously as Todd Bienvenu.

The Gatorman Cometh

Or, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Zombie
– the paintings of Todd Bienvenu

Stooges oil on canvas 2013

There is a place in the soul where the profane damns the sacred and swamps it in whisky and crocodile tears. We know the place, it is a rage that spits venom and sorrow in equal doses. It has on the one hand the rudest manners and on the other the tenderest heart. It is that part of us that curses out the world in the worst language, if only to express our yearning for a beauty and kindness that we
miss in the world.

It is not a pretty sight. In the canvases of a painter from Louisiana living and working in the thrall of Bushwick abstractionism, the scene might look like an upturned graveyard in the bayou after a flood. If painting is dead, says Todd Bienvenu, well then, here’s a painting of a zombie.

Zombie oil on small canvas 2013

Spitfire oil on canvas 2013

Spitfire detail

Royal Rumble oil on large canvas 2013

Bienvenu studied at the New York Studio School, he is a protege of Bill Jensen, and for all his low-brow antics, Bienvenu gets that you have to wrap it up, you have to get it right. He gets that you have to give people something to write about. You have to talk to the conversation. His brush slithers and slimes around like a Mississippi mud snake, but his canvas hangs together splendidly. He is an excavator like de Kooning, and he shares that voodoo thing with Basquiat out of the belly of the
American continent.

Trouble oil on canvas 2013

Barf-O-Rama oil on canvas 2013

Wrestling, bordellos, floozies, whisky lanes, death metal concerts in the hinterlands of unemployed America. Chicks so hot they’re ugly. It’s all there. And he simply has an enviable dexterity with paint. He’s the kind of artist who inspires the back-seat driver in the critic. You want to urge him to go this way or that, to see what will happen. At a studio visit I hear myself sounding like Clement Greenberg, “More flat, less depth!” And so on.

James Ensor and Rick Prol also come to mind. Todd Bienvenu regurgitates art historical references, more so than is readily apparent, since these are well digested, not swallowed whole. They are elegant canvases, once you get past the drawl. And some are complex. We get some Cy Twombly and some phases of informal European abstraction, respiratory painting, event painting.

Todd Bienvenu is an exemplary Bushwick painter. He processes a lot, sorts out a lot, I think, for the scene, all the while keeping a casual under-the-radar attitude. Yet he performs quite well the ambitious painter’s job of hitting bases and killing tropes, and this in a crazy young art scene in difficult times. And he does it without ever being rigid, and never at the expense of the sacred and the profane.

Ethan Pettit, 28 May 2013

Inventory and Prices for Todd Bienvenu
Artist's profile on this site
artist's website
Kang Hoodoo, Bienvenu and Basquait, October 2014
more on Bienvenu in our gallery notebook 2014

Gili Levy at Valentine

Gili Levy, oil on canvas, approx. 46" x 54"
Now on view at Valentine

Gili Levy is in the show that opened last night at Valentine in Ridgewood. She joints Lauren Collings, Barbara Friedman, and Shelley Marlow in "4 Who Paint." This is a good show, well worth a visit. Fred Valentine has an excellent eye and about as good a knowledge of the arts in northern Brooklyn as it is possible to have. The shows at his gallery are consistently intelligent. Gili Levy has been in both of the two shows we've had to date at ethan pettit gallery, and so we are delighted with her placement in the present show at Valentine.

Will the Real Golem Please Step Forward

Matt Freedman's Golem at Valentine

The Golem of Ridgewood:
Matt Freedman at Valentine

The Illusion of Democracy:
Charles Atlas at Luhring-Augustine

Two shows that opened last Friday night in Brooklyn could not have been more different in style and temperament. The premier opening of Luhring-Augustine in Bushwick was a packed affair that featured a dazzling light show on the cutting edge of conceptual art.

The low-key affair at Valentine a bit farther out on the Brooklyn art belt, was an eccentric exhibition of thickly modeled sculpture and curious "artifacts" concerning thousands of years of occult history.

And yet there is a common theme in each of these shows: real estate.

Charles Atlas, The Illusion of Democracy, Luhring-Augustine

In 2002 the artist Matt Freedman bought an old synagogue in Ridgewood and converted it into a living and working space. From this event flows his show at Valentine, in which Freedman exhibits a “half-degraded film” said to be from the early 1940s, along with other “props and artifacts” allegedly discovered in the building. These objects are said to document the efforts of a local rabbi to “build a golem” to defend his congregation against the local German-American Nazi bund.

Hence The Golem of Ridgewood, a work of historical imagination, augmented with sculptures by Freedman that embody all the weirdness and wonder you’d expect from the innards of any old church or temple in Brooklyn or Queens. Among the objects on view is a rather mottled scale model of the synagogue itself.

Matt Freedman, The Golem of Ridgewood
8mm film segment, Valentine

Matt Freedman, sculpture at Valentine

Another interesting transaction in the neighborhood, has been that of a fine old factory in Bushwick by the Chelsea gallery Luhring-Augustine. For several million dollars about a year ago. This has been no news to the local art scene, and the curators have obliged everyone’s curiosity by launching their new space with a show that does the most to highlight what everyone is really interested in — the space itself. That is, there are no objects in the room, only light projections by the artist Charles Atlas. The projections are of numbers, numerals, in various states of animation. See James Kalm's video of the show.

Charles Atlas, The Illusion of Democracy
courtesy of Luhring-Augustine

 

Luhring-Augustine at the corner of Ingraham Street and
Knickerbocker Avenue, East Williamsburg aka "Bushwick"

The inside of the building has been sweepingly renovated, the outside is left basically as it is. And since the show consists only of projected light, the cumulative effect is of the building itself as the featured work, framed, so to speak, between a skim of light and the fact of its renovation. The artist, Charles Atlas, comes from that generation of conceptual artists for whom anything could be art “if I say so.” Whether it is or is not “art” is a matter of judgment, but it is definitely no longer a balloon factory or a chicken farm or whatever the place used to be.

Congregation Agudas Israel on Cornelia Street Ridgewood, Queens.
presently owned by artist Matt Freedman.

Had Fred Valentine of Valentine in Ridgewood curated this show at Luhring-Augustine in Bushwick, the building would probably still be a chicken farm, albeit some weirdly excavated iteration thereof. The difference between excavation and renovation underscores the difference between these two shows, each of which involves a different response to real estate. At Valentine, the acquisition of a synagogue a few blocks away from the gallery is cause for an immersion into occult reverie. At Luhring-Augustine, at least for the moment, it seems to be all about the numbers.

Charles Atlas, The Illusion of Democracy
Feb. 18 - May 20, 2012
Luhring-Augustine Bushwick
Video of the show by James Kalm

Matt Freedman, The Golem of Ridgewood
Open Saturdays and Sundays 1-6 PM and by appointment on Fridays
Valentine