L.A. Artcore Brewery Gallery Coroneos Sculpture- , June 2013- by J McAninch        LA Artcore Listing
     

St Nicholas' ARM

I was recently driving in a thriving, mostly immigrant, neighborhood of Los Angeles. While stopped at a light I saw the following sign: Tax Preparation /Travel Agency. It was not unified corporate branding by a long shot. It was, however, two businesses which the investment in a single computer might make possible. Categorically it was a funny space. No one likes taxes and everyone wants to go on vacation. A perfect case of opposites attract. It reminded me of the parings of surprising, unlikely elements that are the motors of Nicholas Coroneos' work. I see the sculpture in this show as a compendium of our ad-hoc beliefs and values. There are equal parts playful, pop whimsey and an archaic three dimensional hieroglyph that is all about consequences. The work evokes a Pre-Twenty First Century world of material culture. This bronze sculpture, however, is not about nostalgia. It is about those ideas of the past which, through their momentum, carry through to our own era. To loosely quote William Faulkner," a past which is not over, a past which is not even past."

"Living in the Aftermath of War (Hearts and Minds)

These sculptures are bold, humorous and finely crafted attempts to reify a set of" things one might believe in." A kind of idiosyncratic transect of the heinz 57 of values and beliefs awash as flotsam and jetsam in the contemporary world. There are a variety of flickering stories in these works. There is also a quality of the abandoned. As if to suggest an indeterminant level of belief in the husks of stories that the sculptures evoke. If this feeling might be expressed in a line of dialog- it might read ," I am not sure how much I believe this any more, but its still on my mind." There is a classic scene in the American Western where there is a return to an abandoned house. Undisclosed things haunt these spaces. The door creaks open , footfalls on rotted planks and a horizon of years of dusty abandonment slashes back into shadowed, filmic space. By the time the credits roll it never was a good idea to have gone there. Perhaps this signifies the ongoing tendency in our culture to return to older,outmoded, ways of doing things in the face of a troubling present. In some way the sculptures of Coroneos evoke this kind of ambivalence while, also suggesting ways forward. There is a thread of addiction, and its language and metaphors that run through Coroneos' sculpture. Though the addiction recovery business grosses many billions of dollars in the United State and it is a part of the media lore and life experiences of many, few artists have routinely touched on this subject. This sculptor takes the linguistic cliches of addiction and playfully performs an act of reification on it. He has created jarring and off kilter works. Some of his titles "The Wagon, " Lift My Spirits," and "Last Call," bring to mind and put a new wary spin on the language casually associated with the culture of the leisure, addictive ,industrial complex. The other thread is religion and the cathedral as an architecture of aspiration. In discussions Coroneos has said that ,"The Catholic Church is perhaps the best recognized brand in the world." It is almost synonymous with aspirations of the highest order and of some central values of western culture over Millennia. This "brand," is used by the sculptor as a colliding force with the low downward earthly force of addiction. He explores paired, charged low and high elements and brings them into a kind of stabilized art containment field. In this state a viewer may examine and question prevailing beliefs and, perhaps ,come to some new conclusions. A healthy inoculation of doubt towards simple explanations or beliefs is perhaps the highest gift Coroneos' work offers the viewer. 

       The author, Jim Mcaninch is a sculptor and member of the "Critocracy Crit Group" with Mr. Coroneos. McAninch Studied with David and Eleanor Antin and was teaching assistant for Allan Kaprow in Art History while obtaining his MFA in sculpture from UC San Diego in the late 80's

"Good Friday"

"The Wagon"

"Last Call"

"area gray" 49 heads by Luis Velasquez

  

"area gray  installation sculpture Luis Velasquez

This is a work of insider criticism. I know the artist and write as a way to add to the conversation about meaning and possibilities.  I mean this in reference to Velasquez's art and the general understand of the varieties of art making in my world. This is not evaluative criticism spring from the idea that writing about art is the production of another art work . A work that stands in relation to the original art work casting light in multiple directions.


 Luis Velasquez takes a news story as a beginning point for an oddly memorative sculptural installation"49 heads." It is a art work that connects Northen Mexico with the pastorial, idealized colon real estate haven of Santa Barbara.  These connections are by a circuitious speculative and entirely contingent route.
     I will delay to discuss the work's sourcing in that I am of the opinion that  there is a huge difference between the source and what might be called the genesis or synthectic power of an art work. This I argue inheres
in the recombinant cross-linking of spaces of concern which bubble in our cultural present.
      The show consists of a set of 49 head like grey concrete elements in a scatter configuration on an equally gray floor.  The room is white walled galleresque mechanical room and the show was a part of the end of term exhibit  at Artium Space UC Santa Barbara. Exposed ventilation and meandering surface mounted electrical conduit and a breaker box suggest an undisclosed wherehouse . It is a space poised at a  grey midpoint between  the nefarious and the sublime. The "head elements"  are variously textured cast and reworked concrete. They lay at  various attitudes. In some orientations facial features allow the viewer to recognize a likeness of the human visage. In other orientations the impression is as only so many strewn concrete boulders.  The idea of industrial trans-vagrent cast offs also comes to mind.  This structured play of recognition and its absence form an associational orbit between the human, communal traces of life and a the forensic pleroma , perhaps the geologic debris field of disregard and abandonment.  The impression is of a "kind of theatre " of reenactment but what is being re-inacted? 
     

At this point one might turn to the source but were something comes from is commonly taken as its explanatory principle, "But it isn't."  I again will delay. 

One is confronted with a field in which a unified determination of the depicted visual referent is at every turn problematized.  The issues of concealment and readability. There are flickers of a visage of humanity and a kind of cold abandonment which refuse to cohere. Meaning shifts and rolls restlessly in the mind. 
    But what is the source you ask?  The source is the end not the beginning. The source is where you went not where you came from. You will find it where all our modern answers lie- on the internet- search "49 headless" "mexico,"  All the questions thereafter become mute.
   

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art so cal-find observe describe

This blog is an overview and streets eye view of art in Southern California.  It is not a report on business as usual but on artists and exhibitions which seem to be illuminating new terrain and laying down new tracks through the artistic landscape.  So often a viewer is confronted with art  which seems odd, arbitrary, and to be on view only due to arcane, presumptuous marketing concerns.   In many  cases this is the case.  The  situation though is always in change and in a few cases an artist is through the improbable contingencies, half steps , faints and various other path opening strategies  trying to  lead a viewer off the track of conventional thinking and into a multi-layered appreciation of our cultural  present.   As a general template these works on first "run through" in a viewers mind  lack in some fundamental way.  Their way of being not there is a clue to the fact that what is being discussed is off the map.  Thus is begun the process of placing the work in the world.  This is a process which in the process expands both work and world.  In broad brush strokes cultural context is what is at stake.  Everything and nothing in so much as there is no set measure .   Work and world co inform each other.  Criticism  at its essence is  a system of discussion that forwards this process