The career retrospective of the L.A. painter is nothing short of smashing. Why Lari Pittman's densely layered brand of visual overload yields profound meaning.
That was the year he produced an unprecedented series of exceptional paintings and painted sculptures. Their theme, forthright and unabashed, is encapsulated in “Lari Pittman: Declaration of Independence,” the title of his breathtaking new career retrospective at the UCLA Hammer Museum.
Pittman, painting on commercial wallpaper applied over 9-foot mahogany panels, stages a fierce embrace of traditional decorative treatments and craft techniques, which he continues to employ today. Crackling, color washing, rag rolling, strié and a variety of otherOne work even sports a shelf, which juts out a foot and a half from the painting’s surface. Two painted-wood objects are carefully placed on top, organic abstraction deployed as a material knickknack.
The paintings are titled in disarmingly patriotic terms, including “The New Republic” and “Plymouth Rock.” Because the imagery shuns flag waving, instead weaving solemnity, decay and even violence into the mix, these words assume the urgent quality of a demand in the face of dissolution. Sincerity overwhelms possible mawkishness.
This is where it is necessary for me to disclose the close friendship, including among our respective spouses, that I have developed with the artist over more than 30 years. It began with my dropped-jaw admiration for these 1985 paintings. So make what you will of my eager enthusiasm for the smashing retrospective, a fervor that is anything but disinterested.
Others are illuminated manuscripts — not personal prayer books for private meditation, but big, outsize tomes in elaborate and colorful bindings, the kind that might command a communal choir. They’re laid out on three-legged reading tables, at once visually wobbly and miraculously floating, designed in collaboration with architect Michael Maltzan.
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