Charles Lewis Art - California

New Review from Paris

One of my contacts in Europe alerted me to this post from the distinguished French “finder” and critic Jacques Beauzot. (reprinted and translated from the elusive guerilla Parisian online art journal, Art Primitif.)

A Profound Look at Another Dimension

By Jacques Beauzot

A few days ago, while in Geneva, I had the pleasure of viewing some remarkable paintings at the chateau of a noted collector of so-called “underground” art. In this case, underground is far from the street art and graffiti that has so far subsumed that name, but rather represents the collector’s quest to find the finest truly unknown artists working today, primarily in Europe and the Americas. This collector, who has requested that her name not be used, has with considerable difficulty assembled a group of Charles Lewis paintings covering over two decades of his work. The artist was unknown to me, I am sorry to admit. Apparently Mr. Lewis prefers to work in obscurity (perhaps anonymity is more accurate) in order to keep his highly original artistic vision uncontaminated by the marketplace. At least that is what I’ve been able to find out from Ms. X, who tried for several years to contact the artist by conventional means.

Through a friend in California, Ms. X was eventually able to secure an interview with the artist. He only releases paintings after lengthy (often multiple) interviews with prospective collectors, which do not by any means ensure his willingness to allow a painting to leave his possession. Ms. X recalls Mr. Lewis saying that that this philosophy “creates things that the ultra-rich cannot buy at any price.” The terms of release are also unusual: rather than an outright sale, the artist releases pictures as a “semi-permanent lease” subject to revocation at any time the artist desires. The collector must agree to a lengthy set of conditions before taking a work home.

In the paintings in Ms. X’s collection, Lewis interrogates the conundrum between cultural specificity and archetypal subjectivism with a postmodern denial of the painting as sacred object. His visual vocabulary is highly charged, but not without a touch of absurdist humor that is both slapstick and somehow uncanny. The imagery speaks of human vulnerability and physical frailty in ways that offer volume, mass and gravity to exploit a kind of strange, seductive power whilst concurrently questioning, destabilizing and reimagining notions of truth and history. Knowing that intellectually driven concepts alone are not enough to make engaging art, Lewis manages a hauntingly evocative voice that is at time profoundly odd, fun and goofy, while at other times is nostalgic, mournful and original.

The paintings superficially seem like gelatinous dreams culled deep from the collective memory of generations, a live vivisection of deep-brain imagery that can be either disturbing or hilarious. Situations of darkness and repression are mind-alteringly present, where mischief and humour resonate in a masterwerk of technical strangeness. Emotionally generous comic eruptions of the surreal create a kind of personal primal trauma catharsis that becomes more and more strange and befuddling. Conscious of their own status as treasure, the pictures venture further outside the system with a particular aesthetic of visual lusciousness that knowingly and aggressively updates our ideas of beauty, at the same time acknowledging that our habituation serves as the loci for every attempt at commitment and sophistication. The tendrilous lines, with almost painfully vivid chromatic levels, achieve a unique level of power, allure, and eloquence.

In every picture we can see an intricate, tensile line combined with raucous color combinations, close hues and values that parody a whole panoply of American painters. The expansive yet clean palette and confident line are colleagues in tumultuous compositions, eddies, zigzags, abrupt abutments and explosions that you experience as an exhilarating eyeful, gorgeous, smart, risky and vertiginous. In many cases the foreground and background relationships are those of folk art naivete, yet contain a respectful, joyous purpose in their exploration. Most Lewis paintings have a central figure with considerable dimensionality, a character in a narrative that alternately expresses a quirky humour or tongue-in-cheek potential for violence.

The artist’s use of insistent lines and closely observed details easily overcomes our ennui that hardly anything in the art world can inspire wonder in us now. Rather we find ourselves adamantly present, trying to comprehend an art experience that is both magically elusive and that addresses our aesthetic expectations of new phenomenological engagement with art and time in its infinite possibilities.

Reaching back to a time when paintings originally meant something like zeitgeist, Lewis juxtaposes consciousness with physical phenomena and conjures experiential alchemy within a defined field of action that bears the ineluctable imprint of alien activity. The artist has constructed a world in which the sense and sentiment of existentialist philosophy is given form. The work simmers in a cocido of intentionally anti-cultural references that are stylized, colorful, sometimes violent, sometimes sexual; a cross-pollination of genres and tropes that embark on a literal and metaphorical odyssey as the eye traces the iconographical hop-scotches that navigate between clashing worlds with a sense of omniscience that seems to jump off the canvas at you.

One can occasionally see the slightest whiff of apocalyptic doom that forms a reference point for a much broader range of ideas and expressions. The commingling of contradictory ideas and sensibilities functions as both image for contemplation and a pastiche of such an image. Contradiction and complication are at the heart of paralleled tensions between natural and imaginary environments in a tangential approach to symbolist power that fuses irony with dazzle, gloom with exuberance. A hallucinogenic, otherworldly atmosphere pervades almost every work, exuding and exemplifying an irrepressible vitality through troubled yet still magical "landscapes." Through a flawless and luminous merging of aesthetics, a combination of Old World virtuosity and New World philosophy, the artist expands on the traditional vernacular with grace, elegance and an unquantifiable mystery.

The self-declared “portraits” of all kinds of objects, familiar and not, function as portraits as well as a meditation between memory and literal time. They operate within the realm of memory as a point of rest or contemplation, as though the figure had transcended a slow, deliberate process of staging a return to another dimension. This new dimension is at once rich and powerful, with playful, buoyant shapes allowing no distractions. These “portraits” are experienced more as deliberate eruptions into the space than as dissections that parcel out space, time, color and form.

Using elements essential to its pulse, its drive, the portrait form allows totemic and self-possessed imagery to dominate the viewer’s consciousness. The almost faux-naif style is a springboard for virtuosic creations that are loose but confident, decorative and often repetitive, occasionally psychedelic but not sell-indulgent, without ever losing the sense of improvisatory freedom rendered with a heightened sense of specificity. The loaded mix of character and formal distance has been deflected, sublimated into the abstract possibili¬ties of primitive power that evoke our simultaneous awe, laughter and deference. Memories dissolve and reappear in scandal and myth, dramatically posed and constructed as bits of freak mythology that can, to the unwary, seem to confront nightmare issues of comfort and discomfort, ease and confidence, in a tortured relationship to a seemingly familiar artificial environment infused with a strong sense of the absurd.

The portrait form also allows for a playful, yet ominous presence that mocks the ever-so-serious conundrums of existentialists; it invariably catches us off guard, at a loss to compute our experience as merely amusing. Resonating with embedded layers of thoughtful observation, mutual revelation and concealment, yet eschewing the dialectical approach, the artist occupies a complicated stance as wizened outsider in a highly transient enterprise amidst an arrangement of non-ironic, benevolent engagement that communicates the desperation of late-capitalist chaos. Diving into Lewis’s aesthetic experiences we stun ourselves insensible in ways completely baffling, especially to accomplished art insiders.