Cymon Padilla’s show of oil paintings at Leon Gallery is titled “re:mix,” but it’s probably better described as a mash-up. Or, even more accurately, as a 10-car art pile-up.
Caravaggio’s “Doubting Thomas” crashes into Donald Duck. Rodin’s “Thinker” collides with SpongeBob SquarePants. Duchamp’s notorious urinal smashes into cartoon heroes Ren & Stimpy.
Throughout the show, Padilla slams the old into the new, and the classical into the contemporary. He embraces formality only to clobber it with casual commentary. In one painting, he copies Michelangelo’s “David,” but then dresses up the face with something that looks like clown makeup.
Irreverent? Not in a blasphemous way. Respectful? Certainly, yet not in a way that shows authentic deference. Padilla is somewhere in the middle of all that, using his brush to recall the work of the masters with some affection, but then pairing it with iconic imagery from his own growing up. Harmless fun, really.
But it’s also skillful, clever, at times hilarious, and resolutely high-tech.
Padilla starts it all on his computer, loading up images and then choreographing them about the screen using a program called GIMP, a free, open-source platform that works like Photoshop. At its visual core, the work is traditional collage; Padilla manipulates images, colors, connections, so they juxtapose in interesting ways.
Then he recreates his digital concoctions on canvas using oil paint. It’s that last step, rendering works in oil rather then printing them out on various surfaces digitally, as many artists do these days, that makes the paintings inviting and, in some ways, legit. Padilla’s work doesn’t carry any obvious social or artistic concerns, but the medium connects him back to the original masters in an appealing way.
Though it is clearly on Padilla’s terms, and that means the finished products are both surreal and sensational.
This is most effective in his remakes of paintings by Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, the 19th century neoclassical painter known best for his formal portraits of late-day French aristocrats. Ingres was a bit of a visual rebel himself, copying the detailed style of pictorial traditionalists like Raphael, but then altering images, color and perspective just enough to give them a contemporary (in his day, at least) pop.
In Padilla’s hands, the practice of altering the visual facts comes full circle — call it karma, perhaps — with Ingres’ original works getting their own enhancements.
Two pieces, “Collage (blue)” and “Collage (purple),” start with typical Ingres portraits, one male, one female, and both high-society in stature. But then Padilla goes to extremes.
She’s tinted a fierce blue and her eyes and mouth are replaced with features from other well-known works of art, with her right eye lifted directly from the pixelated, comic strip sensibilities of Roy Lichtenstein.
He’s turned purple and given a bouquet of color-saturated cartoon flowers. A funny pages-style speech balloon is placed by his mouth, though it is left devoid of any text. He’s not saying anything.
Both portraits get lush mountain scenery backgrounds, though they come in overly-bright monochromatic pinks and golds. It’s all a bit clumsy and overdone — and clearly that’s on purpose.
Padilla is more graceful, though no more restrained, with “Scramble,” which has one of Ingres’ bather portraits — a favored subject matter for painters since before the Renaissance — stretched, twisted and colorized and broken down into three, horizontal sections set at a 45-degree angle.
While none of the abstractions seem purposeful, there is a sort of freedom to the painting process that fully asserts Padilla’s right to treat this treasured source material any way he pleases. He’s an out-of-the-closet appropriator, and the lengths he goes to in making these recognizable images his own gives them unexpected power.
Within the 13 works in the show, you can see the artist experimenting and evolving. Truth is, he can come off as a prankster at times, relying too much on computer cut-and-paste jobs to make his scenes interesting.
But, at other times, there are flashes of highly skilled composition on display. In particular, when he layers line drawings of animated characters over classical images, as he does in the Caravaggio-meets-Walt Disney piece titled “Incredulous.”
Or when he adds line drawings, and floating mushrooms and grids of multicolored blocks to obscure the portrait of a portly gent in “Arrangement.”
Or when he loosens up a bit in terms of painting as he does with “Sad Boi,” which adds exaggerated features and rough, random splotches of color — pink, yellow, blue and green — to the face of “David.” It’s oddly painterly and personally expressive.
In these moments, the works transform from playful to sophisticated, and it’s good to see that Padilla is capable of going deeper if he chooses to do so.
It all works on some level, though, and the show should have significant appeal to folks around the same age as Padilla (he’s 35) who grew up on Nickelodeon and the Cartoon Network and who will see nostalgic bits of their past remixed into the work.
“Re:mix” is super casual as far as art exhibits go; small, inviting and unpretentious — traits that make uptown’s Leon Gallery welcoming year-round. And the art is priced reasonably, so those 30-somethings who love Sponge Bob as much as they might love Michelangelo can afford it.
Cymon Padilla’s ”re:mix” continues through Jan. 19 at Leon Gallery, 1112 E. 17th Ave. It’s free. Info at 303-832-1599 or leongallery.com.
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