F. Scott Hess’s oil paintings balance time-honored compositional techniques with a bright, saturated color palette and elements of kitsch. He directly translates the cultural symbols of American suburbia — country club dads, manicured lawns — into modern-day history paintings. Like the 18th and 19th-century depictions of great battles, his oil paintings feature multitudes of characters sprawled out across a single canvas, each person involved in his or her own activity and reacting to the situation at hand in different ways. At times, Hess plays with perspective, warping the scene as if it was distorted by a fish-eye lens or a botched panoramic photo on an iPhone. The results give viewers a chance to be voyeurs in situations that were once mundane but have become far-removed and strange.
Oil painter and performance artist John Robinson crafts cerebral, wistful, and, at times, humorous self-portraits. His works, often rendered in monochromatic tones, sees the artist donning masks and contraptions that speaks to his current reflections. Elsewhere, he re-imagines moments of art history through his distinct filter.
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Tokuhiro Kawai is known for paintings that both recall and satirize scenes from mythology. Yet, as his statement with Gallery Gyokuei reminds us, “The history of pictorial expression is history of reproduction.” In recent years, Kawai has specifically garnered popularity for the motif of felines donned in the garb of royalty.