Friday, November 5th, 2010
Progress in the Face of Disaster :: Josh Keyes @ David B. Smith
Emergence, 2010 (All images via David B. Smith Gallery, text © Jeff Newman/TheArtCollectors)
I’ve been an admirer of Josh Keyes since first seeing his work in 2007. Yet, though his drafting and painting skills have grown increasingly impressive from a steady schedule of two solo shows a year, the delicate subtlety of his messages has largely disappeared. It’s a shame really. With Keyes, less has always been more, and his move towards increasingly overt imagery has actually simplified his art.
Collision (on view now at David B. Smith, Denver) signals a promising progression for an talent whose lightning paced success may have temporarily stunted his artistic growth. Within a single painting Keyes concurrently blends his blatantly apparent messages with ones more clandestinely cloaked, making this new series his most successful in some time. And, while this new body of work continues to include easy to digest post-apocalyptic environmental themes, the most successful ones are covertly suggestive and intertwined in history.
The show also marks a new and ambitious direction for Keyes, in that the ten paintings on view form a chronological storyline. Based on a a set of allegorical images of regicide and resurrection that Keyes found in a sixteenth-century set of engravings, this exhibit promises to be the first installment in a trilogy of works depicting the fall, disintegration, and reemergence of Keyes’ protagonist in the face man’s destruction of the planet and a post apocalyptic world.
Josh Keyes – Collision
Nov 5 – Dec. 11
Opening Reception: Nov 4, 7-10pm
David B. Smith Gallery
1543 A Wazee Street
Denver, CO 80202
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