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Art. Word. Thought.

Emmeric Konrad: Walking On Thin Ice Just To See My Reflection

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at Tieken Gallery, Los Angeles (through March 31, 2018)
Reviewed by Shana Nys Dambrot

Emmeric Konrad paints angels with dirty faces, serafim porn stars, saints with reality-hangovers, and refugees from justice in rags of former couture. Chainsmokers at church, day-drinkers at Disneyland. His fraught and tectonic compositions are like stream of consciousness literature or automatic drawing, a madman writing complex pictographic equations. One imagines him painting in a trance, a frantic archeological dig for visions that spring forth; however almost nothing you see is random. Any given 12 square inch passages of a single panel contains multitudes enough to make a fine painting on its own, already as dense with detail as a neutron star is packed with atoms and also infinite invisible unfathomable emptiness. Using acrylic, oil, spray paint, and sharpie, Konrad conjures dots and swirls, scrawls and scratches, folds tucked inside flatnesses, passages of solid and eccentric colors, soft contours with sharp edges, vipers nests of line, awkward bent limbs, sagging flesh, perky nipples, loads of penises, and distraught animal spirits –– especially the recurring appearance by a dangerous, bedraggled but eternally optimistic pink rabbit with a secret. The rabbit is all of us.

When Emmeric’s unique style was developing, part and parcel of the heady days of 1980s and ‘90s downtown LA art world, it was all but synonymous with the lifestyle and the lust for life, dusk until dawn, ride or die compulsion to make something unflinchingly real. It violently upended expectations for that slick LA prettiness the world had heard so much about, speaking to a darker, gothic and gonzo way of life inseparable from making art. It belonged to a vision of sexuality as a wild thing, a feral freedom available to all. Most of the work currently on view in Chinatown is from 2017, along with a few from 2018. Now living in the world he helped create, Konrad is turning the focus of his style away from a social examination and toward something more inward, identity-based… we don’t need another champion but this is the hero we are getting. One for better or worse ideally suited to our times. 

From My Mouth To Your Mind. Photo courtesy of Shana Nys Dambrot.

Moved by the struggle for gender equality and especially the situation of transgender military service people, Konrad has undertaken a fresh iteration of his core creed of justice-for-all post-punk egalitarianism in this emotionally earnest but politically skeptical celebration of all things too much. There’s text too, legible and confessional, declarative and heart-breaking –– all worked in as part of and counterpoint to the imagery. With a Schiele-like haunted, hunted quality, this work opens up the psychological dimensions not just the behavioral –– though there’s still plenty of sex and liquor to go around. All the volatility remains in the way it’s made, seeming performative even in private, but at the same time animated by more overtly political messages –– because isn’t everything right now? He’s grown as an artist, and is now using his indelible language to tell more nuanced, sagacious stories –– tales of a citizenry that are slightly more engaged but no less beguiled.

Installation views. Photos courtesy of Shana Nys Dambrot.

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Shana Nys Dambrot is an art critic, curator, and author based in Downtown LA. She is LA Editor for Whitehot Magazine and a contributor to KCET’s Artbound, as well as HuffPost, Vice, Flaunt, Fabrik, Art and Cake,Artillery, Juxtapoz, ALTA Journal of California, Palm Springs Life, and Porter & Sail. She studied Art History at Vassar College, writes loads of essays for  books and exhibition catalogs, curates and juries a few exhibitions each year, is a dedicated Instagram photographer and author of experimental short fiction, and speaks at galleries, schools, and cultural institutions nationally. She sits on the Boards of Art Share-LA and the Venice Institute of Contemporary Art, and the Advisory Council of Building Bridges Art Exchange.
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