Installation Shots From: Gaiety Is the Most Outstanding Feature of the Soviet Union
Installation Shots From: Gaiety Is the Most Outstanding Feature of the Soviet Union
Installation Shots From: Gaiety Is the Most Outstanding Feature of the Soviet Union
Installation Shots From: Gaiety Is the Most Outstanding Feature of the Soviet Union
Installation Shots From: Gaiety Is the Most Outstanding Feature of the Soviet Union

Tomory Dodge

SELECTED WORKS BY Tomory Dodge

Tomory Dodge
Modane

2009

Oil on canvas

213.4 x 243.8 cm

Tomory Dodge
Salton Sargasso

2005

Oil on canvas

228.6 x 215.9 cms

Tomory Dodge
The Days Are Ahead, The Nights Will Soon Catch Up

2010

Oil on canvas (diptych)

213.4 x 365.8 cm

Tomory Dodge
Weekend

2005

Oil on canvas

211.7 x 241.9 cm

ARTICLES

Tomory Dodge, Acme Los Angeles, By Jeffrey Ryan

Blues legend has it that if guitarists find themselves at the crossroads, they can make a deal with the devil to play well. For a painter, since the roads to painting always lead towards either representation or abstraction, finding yourself at that junction probably means a Faustian pact involving the ability to paint both skillfully. No one of late has been as successful at this as Gerhard Richter, who continues to show just how far one can push painting. That’s not to say that the exercise has been exhausted. On the contrary, as Tomory Dodge demonstrated in his works at ACME, there is plenty of elbowroom left in both directions. Dodge may swing from pole to pole, but he is always faithful to one thing: paint. He clearly enjoys the stuff and doesn’t hesitate to trowel through it, bend it, smear it and even squirt it straight from the tube.

In S.G. (all works 2006), an easel-sized painting of a group of palm trees that at first glance look LA perfect, if a little fractured, we see Dodge at his mimetic best. A closer look, however, shows the trees to constitute the same quirky gestures from which the abstract works are built. All that you need is there: the hazy sun-shine backdrop, the trees seen at a certain urban distance – not a thicket like in the tropics, but lonely palmy neighbours embodying much of the Southern Californian landscape in their vacant, spread-out, stoic stances. Pushing away from this slice of reality and on into abstraction is Early Riser. The background is as lovely as any morning, with the pinks and lavenders of dawn’s early light, while Dodge builds up a pile of thick brush-strokes from greys to outright rainbows. His palette looks like tortured colour wheels and grey scales, all dragged around and smeared together. These marks float about, building into climaxes fixed against the atmosphere. Where Richter’s gestures show a total commitment of purpose, Dodge allows his to waver – not out of a lack of confidence but from something more like an abiding faith in meandering.

Survivor Type has the same erector set of marks built up over a vibrant, almost fluorescent, rainbow background; however, this time these gestures are riddled with what look like bullet holes. These cavities conjure up empty places, with lonely, rusty things riddled with traces of killing boredom and a few too many beers drunk. What they are doing in a Modernist painting is basically just blending in, like camouflage. EFT…, also has a curious look, as though a tin worm has bored a pathway throughout, or someone has sandblasted through Dodge’s brushstrokes. Up close, you see this was simply done with dozens of daubs of paint, all keyed to match the background. These works are not haunted – as Richter’s are – by photography but have the simple painterly concerns of good old-fashioned illusion.

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Source: frieze.com