Ray Yoshida at David Nolan

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When the Chicago Imagists were at their best something freakishly prescient about their particular assemblage of cartoon/icon abstraction and virtual figuration contemporary-surrealism. Something about its added proportions of pop, surrealism, comics and psychedelia, presaging something uncanny about the way the world feels today. Predating the google image search, and yet here it is the compartmentalization of bodies under conceptual scriptures. 

See too: Sascha Braunig at Rodolphe Janssen, 

Alexander Ross at David Nolan



The painting’s physicality found in its detail's quasi-digital scaling, rendering topography as a haptic plasticity reminding you of your face's more rubbery bits. Ross’s lumpen portraits are reminiscent of the original Smiley Face™ created to keep workers happy, a smiling complacency of un-revolving ideals, assuaging masses.

See too: Heather Guertin at Brennan & Griffin.