Urban Art Association

Crash One & Oliver Vernon @ Joshua Liner Gallery, by JoshuaLinerGallery on Jan 12, 2009 21:39:06 GMT 1, Our first exhibits of the new year open this Saturday January 17th with Crash One (John Matos) & Oliver Vernon. Both artists will be in attendance at the opening reception on Saturday from 6-9pm. Releases and sample images below, if you would like to receive the preview link please contact the gallery directly. We hope to see you here.

Crash One (John Matos) :

Including new paintings and selected works from the 1990s, the exhibition highlights the unique place Crash
holds in the development of late 20th century visual culture. Some twenty years after Roy Lichtenstein first
brought comic books into the fine art discourse, Crash did as much for American graffiti, incorporating his
signature tags and style into large, spray-painted canvases. Once transposed, this street language identifying
cultural groups and delineating urban territory assumed new meanings and relevance, appraised finally for its
formal inventiveness.

In more recent works, Crash excerpts mere details from his wider language of linguistic signs, graphic forms, and
rainbow-hued embellishments. Rendered as pure abstraction, these edited bands are placed in contrast with
details from the human body, eyes in particular. Sandwiched between wildly colored bands of graffiti-styled
marks, these glistening eyes both accentuate and subvert the seductiveness of Crash’s self-styled visual language.
Commercialism is at once embraced and repelled. Much like the Pop artists Lichtenstein and Tom Wesselmann
before him, Crash identifies the graphic arts of his own era as both a communicator and container for human
desires—with a measure of the street artist’s ambivalence intact.


Crash (John Matos)
Untitled (Blam)
1998
Acrylic and enamel on canvas
12 x 80 inches



Crash (John Matos)
Rumors Unfulfilled
2008
Spray paint on canvas
36 x 36 inches




Oliver Vernon:

Created with acrylic and ink on paper, canvas, and wood, Vernon’s series of small-, medium-, and large-format
works depicts his own highly idiosyncratic “Big Bang” theory. In the artist’s colorful vision of the cosmos, nature
and culture collide (or cooperate) in the creation (or destruction) of the universe. Any questions of origin or
outcome are overpowered by the sheer dynamism of Vernon’s images: a balletic interplay of protoplasm, cultural
signs, body forms, geometric abstraction, and bravura brushwork.

In Sumi Gouache III, a progression of delicate aqueous blotches evolves into a solid network of bone shapes and
contemporary graphic-design elements. In Pivotal Hotspot, these decorative elements are a soothing, ordered
backdrop for the chaotic clash of wave forms—water, fire, lava, smoke, ice—embattled in diagonal swathes across
the painting’s surface. Cross Fire III, a long, scroll-like work, depicts a smoky miasma of protoplasm and planets.
Contained within space-age purple spirals, this dark mass bubbles against a background collage of architectural
designs, snippets of printed Hebrew text, foreign money, and wallpaper designs.

Vernon’s quirky combinations of organic, mechanical, cosmological, and cultural elements teem with lively
intelligence. Their intuitive grasp of the relationship between energy and matter, thought and action, also
references wide segments of cultural production, including Native American art forms, contemporary Japanese
graphic design, 20th century Surrealism, and New York School abstract painting. Vernon’s “cosmos” creates a fluid
atmosphere where cultural material moves in and out of focus, amid other earthier dynamics. This metaphorical
expanse also allows the artist to explore the “deconstruction and reconstruction of visual space.” According to
Vernon, “Each painting has its own set of rules, or rather, the rules are being bent, broken, and ultimately formed
within each painting. Color, form, energy, architecture, good, evil, flesh, and machine are lurking, never as physical
entities but as transient archetypes searching out their final places within the framework of the cosmos.”


Oliver Vernon
Hammerloom
2008
Acrylic on canvas
66 x 56 inches

Our first exhibits of the new year open this Saturday January 17th with Crash One (John Matos) & Oliver Vernon. Both artists will be in attendance at the opening reception on Saturday from 6-9pm. Releases and sample images below, if you would like to receive the preview link please contact the gallery directly. We hope to see you here.

Crash One (John Matos) :

Including new paintings and selected works from the 1990s, the exhibition highlights the unique place Crash
holds in the development of late 20th century visual culture. Some twenty years after Roy Lichtenstein first
brought comic books into the fine art discourse, Crash did as much for American graffiti, incorporating his
signature tags and style into large, spray-painted canvases. Once transposed, this street language identifying
cultural groups and delineating urban territory assumed new meanings and relevance, appraised finally for its
formal inventiveness.

In more recent works, Crash excerpts mere details from his wider language of linguistic signs, graphic forms, and
rainbow-hued embellishments. Rendered as pure abstraction, these edited bands are placed in contrast with
details from the human body, eyes in particular. Sandwiched between wildly colored bands of graffiti-styled
marks, these glistening eyes both accentuate and subvert the seductiveness of Crash’s self-styled visual language.
Commercialism is at once embraced and repelled. Much like the Pop artists Lichtenstein and Tom Wesselmann
before him, Crash identifies the graphic arts of his own era as both a communicator and container for human
desires—with a measure of the street artist’s ambivalence intact.


Crash (John Matos)
Untitled (Blam)
1998
Acrylic and enamel on canvas
12 x 80 inches



Crash (John Matos)
Rumors Unfulfilled
2008
Spray paint on canvas
36 x 36 inches




Oliver Vernon:

Created with acrylic and ink on paper, canvas, and wood, Vernon’s series of small-, medium-, and large-format
works depicts his own highly idiosyncratic “Big Bang” theory. In the artist’s colorful vision of the cosmos, nature
and culture collide (or cooperate) in the creation (or destruction) of the universe. Any questions of origin or
outcome are overpowered by the sheer dynamism of Vernon’s images: a balletic interplay of protoplasm, cultural
signs, body forms, geometric abstraction, and bravura brushwork.

In Sumi Gouache III, a progression of delicate aqueous blotches evolves into a solid network of bone shapes and
contemporary graphic-design elements. In Pivotal Hotspot, these decorative elements are a soothing, ordered
backdrop for the chaotic clash of wave forms—water, fire, lava, smoke, ice—embattled in diagonal swathes across
the painting’s surface. Cross Fire III, a long, scroll-like work, depicts a smoky miasma of protoplasm and planets.
Contained within space-age purple spirals, this dark mass bubbles against a background collage of architectural
designs, snippets of printed Hebrew text, foreign money, and wallpaper designs.

Vernon’s quirky combinations of organic, mechanical, cosmological, and cultural elements teem with lively
intelligence. Their intuitive grasp of the relationship between energy and matter, thought and action, also
references wide segments of cultural production, including Native American art forms, contemporary Japanese
graphic design, 20th century Surrealism, and New York School abstract painting. Vernon’s “cosmos” creates a fluid
atmosphere where cultural material moves in and out of focus, amid other earthier dynamics. This metaphorical
expanse also allows the artist to explore the “deconstruction and reconstruction of visual space.” According to
Vernon, “Each painting has its own set of rules, or rather, the rules are being bent, broken, and ultimately formed
within each painting. Color, form, energy, architecture, good, evil, flesh, and machine are lurking, never as physical
entities but as transient archetypes searching out their final places within the framework of the cosmos.”


Oliver Vernon
Hammerloom
2008
Acrylic on canvas
66 x 56 inches