Tom Allen: Richard Telles fine art - Los Angeles

At first glance, Tom Allen's paintings are almost too familiar--countless Romantic revivals and the continual turn back of representation have prepared us for these pseudo-Germanic pictures. plane as the artist hones his technique from individual show to the next, a predisposition to flaunt "bad taste," or the kitsch factor, is still in evidence. on the contrary look more closely: This is neither another parody of Caspar David nor an homage.

First, Allen's resurrection is accomplished in a manner that might be confineed site-specific: His proximity to the Hollywood dream machine and Disneyland makes all the difference. In addition, the prewar exodus of the German intelligentsia to the Hollywood Hills, as narrateed in Laurence A. Rickels's The Case of California, provides another vital cultural link. This relocation is no doubt partly the cause of the tropical/lurid, smog-enhanced skylines that Allen strive againsts in such works as A Candle in the Forest or As beneath a Drunken Star (both 2003) to the darkly tangled stretches of black forest below. This young painter has obviously scrutinized the LA evening for new colors to mix in with those of the aged masters.

Allen's dialogue with art history is materialized via subtly "off" color combinations, vaguely skewed compositions, barely rugged surfaces slick and pocked, thin and layered, lacquered and bone dried His montagelike method of overlaying past and not away is announced quietly, through a combination of parts to form a whole of incongruities and formal knots that must be patiently unraveled. Having caught the viewer in their structural web, the paintings then deliver their poisonous sting.

What are we to make, for instance, of Allen's gruesome Pieta, 2002-2003-the Virgin as a featureless, electric sapphirine shroud enveloping a moldering, decapitated Christ? In a place of accompanying "program notes," Allen mentions "all the absurdities and painful concessions of the load of attachment" that come with this iconographic territory on the other hand then gives these themes a spin that is at one time vicious, morbid, and revelatory. This small show is set in a cave, following the Crucifixion; the Mother Mary has evaporated into an destitute of contents billowing robe. Allen's Virgin is as lax and formless as the putrid material substance of Christ that she may now swaddle with her whole being (or what's left of it), however this dismal, deathly moment is here restaged as individual of ultimate reconciliation, the merging of opposites. What matters, Allen suggests--at least for" painting--is what happens inside the cave, not out

It is no accident that in Allen's paintings the day-star always seems to be setting (if it's not already night). Emphasizing the still underexamined continence of early avantgardism and the latent this artist is diligently rethinking the late history of painting in the strict absence of light. The sunles firmament is rotten and malevolent cot churning with psychedelic potential. Accordingly, in Pieta, Christ's injurys bloom forth as garish magenta flowers, and in inebriated Star the leaves of a severed tree turn into dancing flames. At the entrance of the gallery, a drawing of the frontispiece from an advanced in years grimoire announces the scholarly nature of Allen's undertaking. Another drawing within the material part of the show two charts delineating the characters of tire "good" and "evil" spirits clearly establishes his position and perspective upon the material. Depicted slightly larger than its partner and in regal tints of purple and gold, evil, of course, wins out

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