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The New Contemporary Art Magazine
From murals to designer toys, Tristan Eaton emerged from the streets and into well known force in the art world. We featured his TrustoCorp project in Hi-Fructose Vol. 22, but he's since put that venture aside to focus purely on his solo career. His striking, almost dream-like figurative style weaves together contrasting elements of pop, cartoons, and typography. One look at Eaton's work and you can immediately see a collage of influences, and he has always sought to represent this visual language that he loves in a single piece. Eaton really dug deep for his next solo exhibition at Subliminal Projects on his home turf of Los Angeles.
Tristan Eaton (HF Vol. 34) is such a versatile painter, his collage-like murals often include a combination of typography, realistic portraiture, illustration, and patterns — all rendered freehand with spray paint. His ability to mix and match various styles within a single, cohesive image lends his work well to collaborations, like the ones he completed over the course of the past week with fellow street artists Cyrcle and How & Nosm in Brooklyn.
Tristan Eaton has been involved in many high-profile art projects, though you might not know it. The artist formerly created street art and guerrilla installations under the monicker TrustoCorp (featured in HF Vol. 22) while simultaneously running a design studio that served many big-name clients. Recently, he stepped away from both projects to focus on personal work. Eaton has been traveling the globe and painting murals for a large part of the past year and a half and is debuting his first solo show (as Tristan Eaton) in seven years, "Changing the Subject" at Above Second Gallery in Hong Kong, on October 30. The exhibition features a series of collage-like paintings. Within each piece, Eaton hand-paints cartoon characters, typography and realist portraits, weaving them into a dreamlike semblance of the cacophony of pop culture images we're exposed to on a daily basis.
Closing this week at Marcas Contemporary Art, "Smoke & Mirrors" (previewed here) highlights largely figurative works and portraits whose subjects appear in a dreamlike state. Generally, "Smoke and Mirrors" refers to where magicians make objects appear or disappear with mirrors amid a distracting burst of smoke. Although there is unity in the approach, this is an exhibition that embraces diversity. As the name suggests, there's an otherworldly, sometimes "magical" quality to the artwork.