Josh Keyes further pushes his signature “eco-surrealism” with a new collection of acrylic paintings under the title “Implosion.” The new show at Thinkspace Gallery takes us to a post-human time, a bleak reality in which the natural world goes on despite the chaos we wreaked upon it. In this world, human artifacts and even animals are adorned with graffiti, our final communication with a planet we put in peril.
A release details a key evolution in this new set of paintings: “Keyes has recently taken on filling the entire pictorial space, abandoning the white absence of the ground in favor of a more immersive take on his recurring themes and dystopian imagery,” the gallery says. “Rather than appearing as isolated fragments or decontextualized vignettes, the paintings present whole environments: a holistically reconstituted nightmare.”
The gallery says that Keyes has spent the last 15 years “exploring civilization’s final frontier.” The result is a disconcerting, yet wholly engrossing vision.
Iranian painter Ali Esmaeillou reveals haunting parallel universes beneath the pleasant facades of everyday life. In each series of paintings, Esmaeillou explores the psyche of specific archetypes, such as warriors, or digs into the personalities of the characters that compose a particular story, like the great 10th century Persian epic, the Shahnameh.
Born in Los Angeles and now based in Korea, artist