David Ratcliff

Los Angeles

David Ratcliff’s paintings insist on flatness. Although the elements that comprise his works are insistently layered and multiple, the density is visual rather than material; conceptual and ideological rather than bodily. Images, text and painterly accidents are on equal footing in creating an associative narrative. Alluding to a specifically American subcultural underground, the fragments resolve into meaning and dissolve again into form. He culls from the energies of utopic hopes, dystopic nightmares, fantasy and nostalgia to create a new landscape.

In his current exhibition The Spirits that Lend Strength Are Invisible, Ratcliff employs a more multichromatic palate than in previous works, playing not only with clouds of color but with stains of oil that penetrate the surface and lend hints of the visceral. The paintings are meticulously composed but come into being as much a result of painterly chance and accident as deliberate decision. The artist’s hand intervenes in these remnants of popular culture and creates a series of fictions to conjure an alternate psychic reality from our societal detritus.

Honor Fraser

November 10th – December 15th, 2012
2622 S. La Cienega Blvd.
Los Angeles, CA 90034
USA

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