Craig Taylor, “Amplifier Artifact,” 2010, oil on canvas, 72 x 54″
Less precious and more physical than previous work, Craig Taylor’s new paintings, both funny and ardent, look great at Sue Scott. The best pieces recall the lush, drippy, heavily-worked abstraction of the 1980s and early 1990s while incorporating the charmingly ham-fisted compositional strategies of contemporary abstraction and the vivid, high-contrast color of street art. Paint artifacts, some blurry and faded, others bright and crisply delineated, seem to waft in and out of the rough, pentimenti-infused fields of paint, suggesting relationships but never quite coalescing as recognizable objects.
Craig Taylor, “My Foamy Decline,” 2011, oil on canvas, 44 x 36″
Craig Taylor, “The Unsuspected Source of Sensations,” 2011, oil on canvas, 72 x 54″
“In ‘The Unsuspected Source of Sensations,’ the composition is dominated by a transparent orange-and-green structure that looks like the top half of a block-letter E in reverse. Appearing to have gobbled up a swarm of sulfur-yellow blobs, it is a self-generating nonsense machine that is part glyph, part megalith.”
–Jennifer Coates TONY review
“Craig Taylor: Paintings and Drawings,” Sue Scott, New York, NY. Through August 5, 2011.
Just found out about this artist, good to see him on your blog.