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| For March, Roq La Rue is pleased to present new work by two artists, Jim Blanchard and Rene Garcia Jr., who work in unconventional mediums and unapologetically high octane pop imagery. |
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Jim Blanchard, both an acclaimed cartoonist as well as inker of Peter Bagge's seminal comic "Hate", gained notoriety for his early humorous (if rather hard core) illustrations, penned with a virtuoso gift for linework and stippling effects. He later created a series of "sticker paintings" - large scale portraits of 60's and 70's rebel badasses using color fields made entirely from industrial stickers and thick matte black paint which were an instant hit. Blanchard's new works mark a slight departure from the sticker paintings that populated his last two Roq la Rue shows. Since his sticker supply was dwindling, he decided to ditch them and work solely with matte acrylic paint. |
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| These new paintings maintain the impact of the sticker paintings with their large format and quintessential 60s-70s celebrity subject matter, yet unhindered by the flat sticker fields show a much more dynamic, seemingly photographic range of color and tone, cementing Blanchard's status as an unparalleled draftsman with the hippest sense of cool. Also on display will be assorted "girlie art" and small, highly detailed pen and ink portraits. | |
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Like Blanchard, Rene Garcia Jr. creates startlingly bold graphic "paintings" of counterculture rebels and heroes, often in a large, brightly colored format. Their paths diverge in the method and material with which they work. Garcia's work is unusual in that it is not only one of a kind, but deliberately unreproducible. Using a mixed bag of techniques, Garcia creates his work with "fun" materials such as glitter (chosen for its brilliance), as well as vinyl and wood relief. The materials import dimension and a have ruggedness built into their texture, but the handcrafted, carved and layered technique take seemingly ordinary imagery into a new realm of sensory stimulus. These quite literally are paintings you have to see in person. Garcia mines exploitation art, especially the graphic design and composition techniques of old sci-fi or action movie posters and print ads for ideas for his paintings. Mixing irony and humor with his iconography, Garcia's work remains curiously upbeat in a "Hell yeah!" kind of way. His heroes are damaged, and landscapes are polluted, but the attitude in his work remains optimistic. Garcia will also be making a special series of 2-color 3D prints for the show. |
OPENING
RECEPTION
Snax,
Liquids, Music.
Friday, March 12, 2004, from 6-10pm
Everyone
is welcome!
Roq La Rue Gallery, 2316 Second Ave, Seattle WA 98121
For more
info please contact Kirsten Anderson (206) 374-8977
or at kirsten@roqlarue.com