Gary Taxali - Selected Works - ANTONIO COLOMBO ARTE CONTEMPORANEA

9.02 – 29.03.2012

GARY TAXALI – Selected Works

curated by Franco Cervi

The gallery Antonio Colombo Arte Contemporanea presents the first solo show in Italy of the work of Gary Taxali, an outstanding exponent of the fertile American Neo-Pop scene, culturally connected with the Pop Surrealism movement (also known as Lowbrow), but an interesting evolution of it in terms of meaning and language.

Taxali’s work is based on a skillful synthesis of the retro imagery of American comics from the early 20th century (Popeye by Elzie Crisler Segar, Barney Google & Snuffy Smith by Billy De Beck, Nancy and Sluggo by Ernie Bushmiller, for example) and an artistic vision with an ambiguous, detached stance typical of the age of media, in which the rigor of the visual message plays with the unconscious flow of random signs. The effect is one of extraordinary aesthetic reinvention – a perfect fusion of imagination, style and content – capable of calling forth a cheerful visual universe, quiet yet at the same time frenetic, with precise formal borders.

Taxali’s work starts with recycled surfaces like plates from old books, yellowed papers, envelopes still bearing addresses and stamps, scraps of old wallpaper, found who knows where.

There is something spiritual about Taxali’s attraction to found scrap materials, things that have been discarded because they seemed to be of little interest, or had completed their lifecycle of production and consumption. On these unique surfaces, often marked by a series of existing elements – like the bored doodles of their previous non-artist owners, or the typical notes jotted down hastily during a telephone conversation – Taxali intervenes with extraordinary linguistic and formal cogency and equally impressive technical variety: he works with the “Gocco” system (a home device for screen printing) combined with mixed media, homemade rubber stamps, applications, expressing a solid, diversified artistic personality.

An entire galaxy of recurring and psychologically developed characters, perfect avatars, simultaneously tender and petty, pure and evil, reassuring and menacing, blend into a chromatic palette composed mostly of powdery shades, and with a love of lettering, always done by hand starting with existing typefaces. The lettering is never merely ornamental, and often it becomes a true compositional fulcrum, giving the image visual and emotional emphasis.

As Seymour Chwast has recently written, Taxali’s is “an incredible parallel universe made of profound despair and heavenly joy”!

Gary Taxali was born in Chandigarh (India) in 1968. He lives and works in Toronto. He has shown work in many international galleries: Jonathan Levine (NY), La Luz de Jesus (Los Angeles), Iguapop (Madrid), Lazarides (London), Billy Shire (Los Angeles), Corey Helford (Los Angeles), Whitney Museum (New York), Copro Nason (Los Angeles), Victoria and Albert Museum (London). He has taught in many universities and design schools: OCAD University (Toronto), The Art Director’s Club of Houston (Houston), Dankmarks Designskole (Copenhagen) and the Istituto Europeo di Design (Rome). Taxali has won many awards, including: American Illustration, Communication Arts Illustration Annual, Society of Illustrators (Gold Medal), Print, Society of Publication Designers, National Magazine Awards (Gold Medal), Chicago Creative Club, The Advertising and Design Club of Canada, National Gold Addy and Shortlist for Cannes Lion. His clients include: Rolling Stone, GQ, Esquire, Time, Newsweek, Fortune, The New York Times, Entertainment Weekly, Reader’s Digest, Business Week, Warner Bros., Paramount Pictures, Converse, Levi’s, Sony, MTV, Coca-Cola. His first monographic publication is “Mono Taxali”, published by 27_9 with art direction and graphic design by Franco Cervi, and critical contributions by Seymour Chwast, Steven Heller, Charles Hively and Ferruccio Giromini.

by Franco Cervi

For many artists – and not just Americans – the term “Lowbrow” embodies a true attitude: their personalities are often provocative, their bodies covered with tattoos. They have a relaxed mien, intentionally detached from all the erudite issues that had such impact on the art scene in the 20th century. And their music! It’s a sort of pulverized R‘n’R/Hardcore/Skate/Psychobilly/Hot-Rod mash-up that for at least four decades now has become a true code of global communication.

As often happens, however, once a cultural area initially free of categories and labels takes on structure, connotation and encoding, and is encoded in its turn by critique, an era of distinctions sets in, revealing nuances and specificities. The artistic attitude is the same, but important differences start to surface in terms of visual language, reflecting even very different backgrounds.

In this sense, the example of Taxali is an emblematic one. His language has little in common with the visual imaginary of that fantastic Gothic-Surf blend typical of the American West Coast where Lowbrow was born. He does not traffic in irreverent desecration, nor does he try to appeal to a forcefully characteristic audience. Yet his language is clearly Neo-Pop in its references, its formal solutions and techniques, often of a serial nature. His protagonists are very distant from the brilliant R’n’R icons of Anthony Ausgang or the lysergic glitter of Gary Baseman; in fact, we could even say that they are the exact opposite! Men without qualities, something like gray, typically middle-class clerks, but ones whose subtle psychological characterizations can be fully understood through the lesson and the experience of what, until only yesterday, was still considered a far cry from so-called intellectual, cultured, “highbrow” art: comics.

So some reflection is called for on the work of Taxali, as an emerging artistic personality of great character and a very new formal stance.

Taxali’s work comes from the skillful synthesis between the retro iconography of the American comic strips of the early 20th century (we can mention Popeye by Elzie Crisler Segar, Barney Google & Snuffy Smith by Billy De Beck or Nancy and Sluggo by Ernie Bushmiller) and an artistic vision with an ambiguous, detached stance typical of the age of media, in which the rigor of the visual message plays with the unconscious flow of random signs. The effect is one of extraordinary aesthetic reinvention – a perfect fusion of imagination, style and content – capable of calling forth a cheerful visual universe, quiet yet at the same time frenetic, with precise formal borders.

The work starts with recycled surfaces like plates from old books, yellowed papers, envelopes still bearing addresses and stamps, scraps of old wallpaper, found who knows where. There is something spiritual about Taxali’s attraction to found scrap materials, things that have been discarded because they seemed to be of little interest, or had completed their lifecycle of production and consumption. On these unique surfaces, often marked by a series of existing elements – like the bored doodles of their previous non-artist owners, or the typical notes jotted down hastily during a telephone conversation – Taxali intervenes with extraordinary linguistic and formal cogency and equally impressive technical variety: he works with the “Gocco” system (a home device for screen printing) combined with mixed media, homemade rubber stamps, applications, expressing a solid, diversified artistic personality.

As Seymour Chwast has recently written, Taxali’s is “an incredible parallel universe made of profound despair and heavenly joy”!