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Jeff Soto’s current show at the BLK/MRKT gallery in Los Angeles features a new series of paintings on canvas, panel and paper. “Cold Ice Age” continues Soto’s intrepid exploration of his private imaginary world, but with a twist—the amplified conscience of a new parent; the show’s title refers to his intensifying apprehension about the future of the world on behalf of the next generation. Concerned about the global energy crisis and the looming specter of world war, the prevalence of new technologies that make explicit sex and violence ubiquitous and an increasingly vulgar culture that makes precociousness the norm… |
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Jeff Soto’s “Cold Ice Age”
Jeff Soto’s current show at the BLK/MRKT gallery in Los Angeles features a new series of paintings on canvas, panel and paper. “Cold Ice Age” continues Soto’s intrepid exploration of his private imaginary world, but with a twist—the amplified conscience of a new parent; the show’s title refers to his intensifying apprehension about the future of the world on behalf of the next generation. Concerned about the global energy crisis and the looming specter of world war, the prevalence of new technologies that make explicit sex and violence ubiquitous and an increasingly vulgar culture that makes precociousness the norm, the artist’s predilection for science fiction and his penchant for creating visual allegories of lost innocence and mournful, ominous nostalgia is a good fit for his new preoccupations. Soto calls this exhibition “Cold Ice Age” in reflection of these concerns, explaining, “Nature’s cycle always changes the face of our planet. Much of the new imagery is related to the current political environment and how it will affect our future generations. It’s scary to bring a life into the world.”
Becoming a parent may have focused his attention, but the elaborate and poignant visual language of toys, monsters, dreamy surrealism, florid palettes, dark humor and the influence of comics and animation all predated fatherhood within his remarkable oeuvre, and the imagery in this new series of paintings certainly derives from such fears. Yet Soto keeps one foot (or tentacle, as the case may be) in the hopeful magic of a child’s wildest imagination. Followers of Soto’s work will feel at home among the flora and fauna of his parallel ecosystem, populated by cyclops, octopi, runaway robots and other hybrid creatures, half natural animals and half machines, with their murky thought bubbles, multiple limbs and magic wands—in the menacing ambiguity of their steely smiles and glowing eyes. As smart and precise as Soto’s draftsmanship is when depicting details, his atmospheres often demonstrate a complex and nuanced handling of abstraction; the soft focus color fields and smoky, organic patterns set an emotional and psychological tone to his merging of the elements of nature, industry and fantasy into a single grotesque and whimsical vision of a nostalgic future.
