| Aaron Holz’s recent work uses images drawn from popular culture to create small-scale paintings on panel. Scavenging through and selecting out disposable images, he appropriates online video and still images using word searches such as injured or fight. The work includes everything from drunkenness to Ultimate Fighting. “Images of drunkenness, injury, and public exposure posted online strike me as more interesting and complex than what was perhaps their intended purpose. |
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Jeffrey Lutonsky on Aaron Holtz
Aaron Holz’s recent work uses images drawn from popular culture to create small-scale paintings on panel. Scavenging through and selecting out disposable images, he appropriates online video and still images using word searches such as injured or fight. The work includes everything from drunkenness to Ultimate Fighting. “Images of drunkenness, injury, and public exposure posted online strike me as more interesting and complex than what was perhaps their intended purpose. Each time I begin searching, I end up in similar places, for instance Ultimate Fighting is brutal, erotic, and perverse.”
To arrive at his "abstracted hyper-realism," a process that combines elements of Op-Art and figuration, Holz has developed an unusual and unique painting process. The ground for each painting is made with a thick layer of acrylic gesso that has been "combed" and subsequently painted in with various colors. Figures are then painted on a layer of smooth, clear resin that has been poured over the textured ground and allowed to dry. In the finished painting, his figures seem to float above or recede behind a background of colors and patterns, which yields an unusual optical effect wherein the depth of the surface of the work interferes with the eye’s ability to see illusory depth in the painted figures. This is compounded by the fact that the combed ground often substitutes for or obliterates pictorial components that appear in the foreground, thereby further challenging the eye to make sense of the artist’s use of pictorial space.
Asked how he moved from creating portraits to these new pieces, Holz said, “I wanted to expand beyond the portrait paintings I had been working on for several years, but the idea of hiring models and making sets seemed problematic and possibly a better place for photographers. I liked the idea of taking a video from YouTube or a pixilated image from MySpace, then choosing to invent the saturation and details from that source. The idea of taking low quality snapshots and looking for the information that isn’t always there is a great way to work. The other interesting part of using these found images is that the emotion is usually real, so there is a believability to the figure that might not be present using models. In the case of Body Shot. the people are engaged in a scripted moment and playing to the public, but their emotion is not directed by an artist intent on making a painting.”
Francis Bacon famously describes Ingres as one of the greatest painters of female flesh, arguing that he had to love women’s flesh in order to make “The most sexual bodies that have ever been made in painting.” The joke, if you reduce this to fetish, is that Holz must like guys who are beat up and women who are drunk.
Figuration and its unwillingness to go away has everything to do with artists’ interest in describing, observing, and modeling flesh, and the public’s continued desire to be seduced by it. Though it doesn’t always work out as intended. Marilyn Minter’s paintings from the early 90s were explicitly pornographic to the point of being un-erotic. In her recent work, the mouths, eyes, and feet that have replaced the genitalia are more sexual while being less explicit. Holz’s paintings are tame in terms of what they actually reveal, but they still pulse with sexual undercurrents.
