Chicago – In 1951, the French painter, sculptor and the founder of Art Brut, Jean Dubuffet, gave a conference at the Chicago Arts Club entitled “Anticultural positions”. There, he said that the only artist from Chicago he wanted to meet was Ivan Albright, “the master of the macabre”, who was known for his detailed morbid representations of the human figure. The artists who attended this conference include George Cohen, Leon Golub, Theodore Halkin and June Leaf, who would all later be considered as members of the Monster List, a term invented by art critic Franz Schulze in 1959.
Retrospectively, Albright's idiosyncrasy, as well as the Museums of Chicago, the school of the Art Institute and the isolation of the city of the New York art world put Chicago artists on their own courses, distinct from those of their Manhattan counterparts. This dynamic story has always intrigued me.
Even after the Internet opened us in the world, Chicago artists have continued to respond to their own history and do something about it. With each next generation, it becomes dense and more complex because it branches into a new territory.
I was struck by this ability to be fresh and stimulating, and contribute to this story, when I met the exhibition Geoffrey Todd Smith: Assembly to Western exhibitions. The 15 works of the show on paper are rendered with humble materials – gouache and gel pen – and vary in size from 6 by 4 to 47 1/2 per 60 inches. I consider Smith's work as an implicit criticism of manufacturing and expensive materials that are common in New York art galleries and their embrace of large -scale works, something for a long time rejected in Chicago.
The monochromatic terrain of the works provide a base for the palette that Smith uses to represent its compressed and multi-party forms. Its vocabulary consists mainly of circles, increased by rectangles and round edges resembling a microphone. Using different colored inks, it meticulously traces zigzag lines in the shapes or around their edges, which makes the circles volumetric. The continuities and disturbances of the lines and colors add to the visual complexity of the work.
Smith's art is found on the cuspid between eccentric abstraction and automated science fiction figures, whose vibratory color relationships share something with the OP art and the Pointillist masterpiece of Georges Seurat “A Sunday on the big bow(1884–86), in the Collection of Art Institute in Chicago. The interaction of locking and overlapping circles and moves between symmetry and asymmetry, maintain the attention of the spectator in motion and refocus. The previous generations of art from Chicago, which were determined to make images, and rejected abstraction.
We do not know if Smith represents machines, humans in protective combinations or faces very decorated with the beings of an unknown world. With their humanoid eyes and the original titles of the works, his pieces are emblematic of a world in which we have lived for a long time, comics and marvel films with toys and video games, and that for which we are preparing, dominated by AI. It is an imaginative field where anything can happen, which allows us to contemplate the unstoppable incursions that robots and AI have made in our lives, and to consider the different consequences of our automaton future. What is disturbing – and Smith clearly knows it – is that all we imagine will not be what is happening.
Geoffrey Todd Smith: Assembly continues in Western exhibitions (1709 West Chicago Avenue, Chicago, Illinois) until April 12. The exhibition was organized by the gallery.
