LA CIENEGA AREA

It’s ironic that French philosopher Jean Baudrillard has become a theoretical guru for many Post-Modernists. His post-Orwellian warnings about loss of meaning in an image-saturated society, where language exists solely for the mere “ecstasy of communication,” have proved very seductive to the younger generation of painters who have emerged since conceptualism. What better way to justify painting’s renewed life after death than to attach it to a philosophy that appears to validate redundancy?

Peter Nagy and Kevin Larmon, a pair of New York painters, not only rigorously illustrate Baudrillard’s theory but seemingly fulfill its worst nightmares by transforming the banal into the emptiest of spectacle. Nagy’s “Cancer Paintings,” for example, are black-and-white abstractions that appear to be photographic enlargements of cancer cells or microscopic amoebas but are in fact superimposed painted logos and symbols from newspapers and magazines. The metaphor of cancerous growth is neatly applied to the political economy of media sign systems. That Nagy is himself a willing accomplice in the conspiracy seems to be an acknowledged contradiction that has yet to be worked out.

Larmon’s output so far has been confined to the still life, each work depicting what appears to be a bowl of fruit or eggs against an amorphous, thickly varnished ground. This staple of the Old Master tradition is not what it seems, however. The objects themselves turn out to be collaged color photographs so that the representational immortality of nature (the still life) finds its ideal metaphor in the colorfastness of mechanical reproduction. It is the surrounding painting that will ultimately deteriorate, thus enveloping a banal, repetitive image in a sea of inevitable decay. That paintings as seductive as these harbor such nihilistic concepts is a perfect illustration of the medium’s power to deceive through rhetorical abuses. (Michael Kohn, 313 N. Robertson Blvd., to March 3.)