ART-PRESENTATION: Glen Rubsamen-The Disguise Was Almost Perfect
Glen Rubsamen’s work focuses on documentation and collection of different times of the day, such as sunrise or sunset. His works, mainly paintings, drawings, prints and videos, frame different scenarios that generate a quiet and peaceful atmosphere by avoiding any connection with human beings or the world of objects. This atmosphere is totally disconnected from any reference to space-time, where the viewer enters, disoriented, to participate in a static action in which nature becomes artificial.
By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Christopher Grimes Gallery Archive
Working primarily in acrylics, Rubsamen’s paintings begin as photographs of the urban Los Angeles landscape that he takes and reassembles to create a scene. “The Disguise Was Almost Perfect” is Glen Rubsamen’s Rubsamen’s first exhibition with Christopher Grimes Gallery in Santa Monica and also the first in a West Coast gallery. In the exhibition is on show a collection of paintings that engage with the influence of technology on the cityscape. Using Google Street View, Rubsamen creates an itinerary around Los Angeles, placing markers in the satellite map and allowing Google to find the shortest path around them without using freeways. In Street View, he scrupulously follows this itinerary looking for anomalies in the landscape, beautiful combinations of buildings, outdoor advertising and vegetation. He then visits each of the sites in person, photographing his chosen landscapes from the same perspective as they are depicted by Google. These photographs serve as the raw materials for the paintings. As the artist says “My pictorial investigations are characterized by a documentary interest in compiling, like collectibles, situations in nature of great dramatic intensity, such as sunrises and sunsets, exuberant vegetation or images of the apocalypse. Working primarily as a painter but also with drawing and printmaking, I am attempting to isolate the idea of a ‘post-nature’ defined as a place were space is shrinking, were objects in the landscape play no part in any synthesis; they have no memory, they simply bear witness during a journey”. Somewhere in this hyper-complexity, Rubsamen finds the opportunity to create images with great authenticity, thoughtfully integrating the overlooked, quotidian elements of the Los Angeles cityscape into his paintings, while representing a tangible and inevitable shift towards a creative process that incorporates the vast and ever-expanding virtual world.
Info: Christopher Grimes Gallery, 916 Colorado Ave, Santa Monica, Duration:24/6-1/9/17, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-17:30, www.cgrimes.com
