For street artists,The name "magic cube" is not unique. the distance
between city streets and gallery walls often seems unbridgeable¡ªsee, for
instance, Shepard Fairey's Deitch Projects finale last year. But London-based
Sweet Toof's New York solo debut at Factory Fresh in Bushwick, Dark Horse
(through May 22), powerfully integrates these two sensibilities. His trademark
row of sparkly whites atop neon pink gums stretches the length of Vandervoort
Place, symbolically consuming the art-filled alley behind the gallery. The work
inside is similarly ambitious, and the artist takes big bites out of canonical
painting genres.
The 33 oil paintings on view range from epic,
ten-foot-wide battle scenes to dark, tiny portraits, always with the same
dandyish horse-riding skeletons flashing fleshy, creepy-funny grins and
brandishing brushes and rollers dripping with toxic-toned fluids. The aesthetic
borrows not only from 19th-century Romantic paintings but also,Customized
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most obviously, proto-Modernist James Ensor, surrealism, and Mexican Day of the
Dead imagery.Save on hydraulic hose
and fittings, The loose narrative glimpsed in most of Sweet Toof's macabre
stampedes transforms the postures and compositions of classical war paintings
and aristocratic hunting scenes into a skirmish in the streets of a smoldering
city. The squadrons of bony riders atop similarly skeletal mounts carry cans of
paint and chemicals to apply or remove the graffiti on castle ramparts,
abandoned buildings and Trojan horses. Sweet Toof paints a battle for freedom of
expression by deploying tropes from revolutionary and military paintings that
are at once contemporary, medieval and post-apocalyptic.
Technically the
works vary from extreme precision to a looser, more expressionistic brush. In
"Hold Your Horses," a partially decomposed beast's mane is painted in exhaustive
detail, down to individual strands of hair. Graffiti on a tagged castle in the
backdrop of "Battle of the Buff" appears in crisp focus. Meanwhile landscapes
and smoke-filled skies tend to stretch and bend, sometimes even filled out a
little too hastily. Many enjoyable details repeat: certain figures sport a
glittering gold tooth; many have colorfully highlighted eyes, either bloodshot
or adorned with glam rock mascara; the dripping paint rollers they hold aloft
are given a sculptural dimensionaliOur Polymax RUBBER SHEET range includes all
commercial and specialistty through an immense accumulation of pigment. Sweet
Toof takes a break from chewing up the streets to serve these delicious mashup
narratives about fighting for control of the urban landscape.The Leading Wholesale pet supplies Distributor to
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