Art review: Scott Short at Christopher Grimes Gallery
May 28, 2010 | 7:00
am
Scott Short’s new paintings are both gorgeous and inane, superficial yet sophisticated — in that insular, art-world way that validates exercising even the slightest concept to exhaustion.
They make a striking first impression. Large (all six at Christopher Grimes measure around 7 by 5 feet) and graphically stark in black on white, they read as lunar landscapes or magnifications of crusty tree bark, distillations of textures from the natural world.
The images actually derive from a process that marries the mechanical and the hand-crafted. Short, an American living in France, starts with a piece of ordinary colored construction paper and makes a black and white photocopy of it. He then copies that sheet, and the next and so on, making anywhere from a dozen to several hundred permutations until one of them captivates him. He projects a slide of that final copy onto a primed canvas and meticulously transcribes its pocks and patterns. A short video that condenses and repeats the process in an endless loop brings to mind a time-lapse instructional film about topographical phenomena.
– Leah Ollman
Christopher Grimes Gallery, 916 Colorado Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 587-3373, through June 19. Closed Sunday and Monday. www.cgrimes.com
Both images: Untitled, (green), 2010. Courtesy of the artist and Christopher Grimes Gallery.