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KNOW	GUEST BLOG

I LOVE LA (Seriously)

Dan Nadel of PictureBox, Inc. blogs about the show he just curated at M+B

M+B

My father grew up in Los Angeles, around the corner from Cantor's as I remember. As a kid I imagined his childhood to be a constant stream of hamburgers and milkshakes, surfboards and roller skates. As an adult, I just started coming to this city a few years ago, and it remains a dreamy sort of place for me. Even though I have lived in New York for nearly a decade, and I barely grasp it, L.A. is the only city in which I actually feel at home. It still feels like the future here. There's space and sky and light that extends through time and makes a million Robert Irwins bloom. And yeah, I don't mind being romantic about it.

I came here this time to curate a show for M+B Gallery for the perfect pairing of Melissa Brown and Mat Brinkman. Mat's genuinely scary drawings: bold, aggressive brush strokes carving out monstrous faces and gives form to our emotional and ethical apocalypse from a thicket of marks proved he has no need for a conceptual apparatus. Mat's aesthetic stance has been as important for many in my generation as, say, Pettibon's was for his.

Mat's monstrous souls gazed across gallery walls at Melissa's vision of loss and winnings deferred.

A supreme craftsperson and shrewd critic of American structures: both physical and economic, Melissa's work is effervescent in appearance but dark in content. Her lotto ticket collages employ sacred geometries in service to near-psychedelic images of loss, debt, and the great the American over-extension. Her mastery as a printer extends the visual scope to hallucinatory vistas and imaginary architecture. These are rich, almost hypnotic works, the power of which only grows the longer you gaze at them.

Artist Joe Bradley joined the M + B staff as we installed all day Friday. Benjamin Trigano, M+B's owner provided support with In-N-Out Burgers while Shannon Richardson, his talented director, ran the show and kept us all in line. It was a great experience. We retired, after a long day, to the art advisor and collector, Stefan Simchowitz's gorgeous mid-century house. We hung out amidst his art collection—which mostly focuses on our friends and peers—watched a fantastic Takeshi Murata video, sat around Justin Lieberman's amazing lacquered table/sculpture, and ogled an enormous Jim Drain sculpture. (Mat and Jim were in the art collective Forcefield, and Joe summed up the sculpture best: "Jim really knows how to party!") Good clean fun.

On Saturday I drove down to Venice to see Charlie White III, whose work is featured in Overspray: Riding High With the Kings of California Airbrush Art, which I published in November. We pulled out piles of his original art for me to peruse for an upcoming exhibition at M+B based on the book. To understand Charlie's role, know this: he was to L.A. what Milton Glaser was to New York: a hot-shit commercial artist in touch with fine art trends, and openly inspired by contemporaries such as Ed Ruscha and Ed Kienholz. I also visited the legendary L.A. artist, Bob Zoell. Zoell began in design collaboration with Saul Bass in the 1950s and evolved to the cutting edge paintings that blend abstraction with a dark, impish humor and a fascinating symbol language. To this day he remains in a category of his own: a sui generis visual genius. His shows at the Ace Gallery must have been incredible affairs. I had the privilege of rummaging through 40 years of his work. He deserves a major rediscovery, which I've attempted a bit in the seventh and current issue of my anthology, The Ganzfeld. I put him in the same category as Bruce Conner, H.C. Westerman, and Wallace Berman (oh yeah, Kristine McKenna's show of Berman's work with Richard Prince at Michael Kohn is fucking brilliant. Do not miss it). He is yet another rugged, ingenious American artist.

Anyhow, Mat and Melissa's show opened Saturday night–the crowd was great—fun and welcoming. Paul Ruscha and Charlie White, two old L.A. dudes both damned mischievous souls, were caught reminiscing. Benjamin welcomed us all back to his house afterwards and we wound down the night, eating and drinking next to the fire and reflecting on a job well done. Standing out on the balcony of this 1930s home, I was happy, tired, and—while not quite ready to go home—content to have had another fantastical visit to Los Angeles, the city of my dreams.

Dan Nadel is the owner of the award winning PictureBox, Inc. and the editor of The Ganzfeld. His writing has appearedThe Washington Post, Print, Frieze, The New York Times, and The Economist. He is also the author/editor of Art Out of Time: Unknown Comic Visionaries 1900–1969 and Gary Panter.