Jason Ramos

July 08, 2014, 9:49am

Signs of the Times: John Mills

In Michaels Fried’s review of Michel Seuphor’s now criminally out of print 1963 book Abstract Painting: 50 Years of Accomplishment From Kandinsky to Jackson Pollock, Fried all but dismisses the very need for such a book, saying, "Whatever controversy it may once have provoked, abstraction per se is by now no longer a live issue.” An understandable stance, perhaps in 1963, near the beginning of one of the more recent bona fide canonical shifts in the history of art. Art is not fashion — but there has always been a fashionability to what kind of art is discussed as part of the current dialog. Human beings have always, and will always, seek to arrange, produce, and think with the more formalized 2D visual concepts; the relatively modern format and practice of painting has, for the last hundred years, been one of the primary sites of that inquiry. - Jason Ramos, Los Angeles Contributor

December 10, 2013, 10:52am

Bodies of Work: Rebecca Campbell

Since her LA emergence in 2002, Rebecca Campbell (NAP #37) has been crafting sumptuous, painterly scenes that range from the poignantly quotidian to the kaleidoscopically fantastical.  The embrace of her paint handling and leaning towards large formats lend heroic, almost legendary proportions to the men, women, and children who inhabit what often appears to be a magically-real version of domestic, middle-class life.  But the dazzle of the paint does not distract or disguise – her pictures look in the eye what is often relegated to the nostalgic, the sentimental, and the emotional.  In the hands of a lesser artist, images of this sort frequently fall outside the purview of contemporary art.  Campbell, however, forges a meditation on autobiography that demands a closer investigation.  The depth of her imagery upends and reclaims motifs such as family, children, rainbows, fireworks, lightning bolts, and mushroom clouds with such deftness that their full meaning seem linked to their depiction in paint. - Jason Ramos, Los Angeles Contributor

Rebecca Campbell | Just Another Diamond Day, 2010, oil on canvas, 72 x 64 1/2 inches. Private collection. Image courtesy of LA Louver, Venice, CA

June 03, 2013, 8:30am

Art of Darkness: Nathan Danilowicz

Tucked away in a former dental office and Rastafari community center between West Adams and Culver City, artist Nathan Danilowicz has been busy.  The rooms of his studio space seem like dark altars in reverence to forces both ancient and modern, where the conceptual strategies of painterly abstraction are reclaimed as the spells and invocations of a lost age.  These tattered, rune-inscribed veils are the latest product of Nathan's inquiry into how sci-fi shamanism, ritual, and the occult share more than just superficial affinity with many of the modalities and practices of modern and contemporary painting.  These new works along with some others will be exhibited later in June at