| If Clement Greenberg wanted flatness, artist Jared Lindsay Clark has accomplished it. The problem is that he is building that flatness from kitsch. Jared Lindsay Clark’s show at ADA Gallery in Richmond, then, is one of contradiction and subtlety. This is not quite painting, but it is about painting. It is not quite sculpture, but it is made of sculpture. This is also not quite found art so much as transformed objects. The ten works in the show were created out of dollar and thrift store figurines intricately arranged by the artist and gelled together with a pool of epoxy resin. |  |
All New Flatness – Andrew Kozlowski
If Clement Greenberg wanted flatness, artist Jared Lindsay Clark has accomplished it. The problem is that he is building that flatness from kitsch. Jared Lindsay Clark’s show at ADA Gallery in Richmond, then, is one of contradiction and subtlety. This is not quite painting, but it is about painting. It is not quite sculpture, but it is made of sculpture. This is also not quite found art so much as transformed objects.
The ten works in the show were created out of dollar and thrift store figurines intricately arranged by the artist and gelled together with a pool of epoxy resin. Of the works, only three of sit on pedestals and claim the more sculptural of stances of the bunch. The others hang on the walls; their flat bottoms suggesting the two-dimensionality of paintings.
While none of these works are two-dimensional in the strictest sense, Clark’s touch and sense of organization come directly from his painter’s eye. In viewing the work Blonde on Blondes, one is reminded of a color field painting by its nearly flawless, soft yellow surface smoothed over by tool dip (a kind of pour-able rubber). The amorphous shape of this canvas draws you in and, in peering past the drips hanging off parallel to the floor, one realizes that what appears to be a painting is really a collection of blonde-haired ballerina keepsake knick-knacks, each gelled to one another by the flatness of their collective feet, which forms the surface of this bizarrely constructed picture plane. Similarly, in White Clouds, we see the bottoms of the figures as exposed through the haze of the epoxy holding them together; their softness and rounded forms working in synchronous formal harmony. Eventually, too, it becomes apparent to the viewer that the construction is composed of tiny cherub figures, all but one of which are white, and all of them from the exact same mold.
The most ambitious of these pieces, The Races, is a monstrous, irregularly shaped object composed of hundreds of figurines secured in place by about an inch of resin. Because of its size, The Races allows the viewer to more fully comprehend the undulating play of figuration and abstraction in Clark’s work, overall. Here, the viewer can see the work as a whole and, as one moves closer, the individual elements become ever more clear. If one tries hard enough, he or she can peer through the resin and begin to decipher each of the individual elements present, but, in standing back from it again, these details fall away into abstraction. Even the price tags, intentionally left in place by the artist, are gobbled up here and function only as found daubs of color.
Clark’s more controversial attempt, Blacks & Whites, features a group of figurines covered with black tool dip sitting on top of another group of white figurines. Upon further scrutiny, it turns out that the black figures here are not just painted black, but are African-American in ethnicity. Suddenly, the black covering functions as a kind of paradox, as it both disguises the figures’ skin color while eluding to it. The wonderful thing about the formalism of Clark’s work, then, is that this kind of play can happen at all. Yet, this is hardly a statement on racial issues so much as a statement of Clark’s formalist color logic—black figures go with black figures just as the white ones go with white, unicorns with unicorns and bunnies, ballerinas and turtles with their respective parties.
Painting is a hard game to play in contemporary art. Through Greenberg’s modernist definition of flatness, however, Jared Lindsay Clark brings new life into this realm by calling our attention to found objects like the ones employed here. The artist both allows them to remain symbols and signifiers while obscuring or breathing new life into them by using kitschy knick-knacks as the basis for his palette.
