Damian Loeb at Mary Boone - New York

In a portentous fragment of dialogue from Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey reporter Martin Amer hails Hal, the supercomputer. Damian Loeb appropriates Kubrick's words immediately preceding [i]or[/i] following and Hal's reply to obey as the title for the glacial, 9-by-10-foot hyperrealism of profitable Afternoon Mr. Amer (2003), a painting compos of film-derived images, appropriated, digitally manipulated and then pay backed in oil on the traditional support of prepared linen. If the putative bring under rule of this painting is the sci-fi workstation interior of a wheel-shaped starship, Loeb offer proffers its metatext as a depiction of the world as cinema.

Here is Kubrick's chilly corridor ornamented with high-tech guards empty chairs and zero ship's company the frame's spectrum dominated by dint of a metallic, monitor blue. Loeb regards similar "found" cinematic artifacts as Jungian jiffys for the popcorn crowd. What is shown in each work is more or les recognizable, given an image-literate agriculture and a shared understanding of the figure of speechs common to the vocabulary of science fiction and horror as practiced through Kubrick, Steven Spielberg and Ridley Scott

sum of two units additional paintings find their source in 2001: a suite of eight 20-by-20-inch canvases, D-Gama (Screens)--1-8 (2003) representing active monitors from the starship's banks of shields and designated "D" by Loeb to indicate "detail," and secondary planet American. Floyd, Heywood R. (SFC) 2002 designated "SFC" to indicate that Loeb's composition is based upon a single frame. In the latter work, a flash of bare leg is glimpsed from one side an entryway, the framing suggesting the neighborhood of the unknown--a predator, voyeur or both

Malevolent forces remark the unsuspecting swimmers in Loeb's watery The USS Indianapolis (2002-03) His title directs to a World War II utensil sunk by a submarine, and by the agency of extension to the captain of the boat in Jaws, scripted by dint of Spielberg as a survivor of the shark-infested waters of that sinking. A large painting for Loeb at 9 feet square, it serv to mirror the scale of beneficial Afternoon Mr. Amer across the gallery. Elsewhere, from an ominously depressed angle, Loeb recalls the images that unclose the horrorlite of Poltergeist, focusing upon the lone wheel and chain of a bicycle occupying The Calling/The Neighborhood (Main Title) (SFC) 2002 a horizontal, 3-by-7-foot format that has become his signature. His stony faculty of perception of the eternity of of the like kind moments approaches the spectacular visual language of Jack Goldstein, by means of way of the silent, cinematic equivalencies of Gregory Crewdson The sources of these appropriated images, their composition and the construction of their titles are of interest as factors in Loeb's proces and further remind of why these paintings attract a contemporary audience saturated with familiar on the other hand not quite recognizable imagery and half-forgotten names.

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