In The Road to Paradise Chester Arnold continues his ongoing visual exploration into notions of accumulation and dispersal. His new work is tempered also by an awareness of the obsolescence facing time honored cultural and artistic practices: heartfelt sentiments no longer occupy letters but are rather featured in e-mail as the printed word increasingly gives way to pixilated screens. With the advent of new media the paintbrush has increasingly acquiesced to the same fate. In this latest body of paintings, masses of books and papers line desolate streets and toss on the wind. One painting, “The Business of America is Business,” is a classic example of Arnold’s ability to create large scale images through minute details. Old telephones, computers, papers, books, vinyl records fill the composition. The images wearily denote a fleeting bygone moment of destruction summoned, perhaps, by our collective visual conscience, media saturated with images of New York streets after 9/11 or the bayous of New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. And yet in paintings such as “Reports to the Contrary,” Arnold is able to extract the ethereal beauty and optimism inherent in watching loose papers dance in the air, summoning that rare moment of hopefulness in the moribund film American Beauty (1999) when Wes Bentley’s character Ricky Fitts films a plastic bag blowing in the breeze.
Chester Arnold’s work was recently included in New Old Masters, curated by Donald Kuspit, at the National Museum in Gdańsk, Poland. His work is also included in the public collections of many institutions, including the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Pasadena Museum of California Art, and the San Jose Museum of Art. Arnold’s work has garnered critical reviews in Artforum, Artweek, Art + Conversation, and the San Francisco Chronicle. He lives and works in Sonoma, California and had his first solo exhibition at Catharine Clark Gallery in 2004. The Road to Paradise is Chester Arnold’s third solo exhibition at Catharine Clark Gallery.
Catharine Clark Gallery, now at 150 Minna Street, between 3rd and New Montgomery
Solo Exhibition: Chester Arnold: The Road to Paradise
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