Imaginative Narrative: Allan Innman’s Tales in Paint at the Georgia Museum of Art

Allan Innman’s roughly five-foot by six or seven-foot paintings at the MFA Candidate Exhibition at the Georgia Museum of Art enfold the viewer in fantastical realms. Deliberately invoking the nostalgia of childhood through toys, Innman elevates these simple beginnings into intricate narrative told in high-key, fluorescent color.

Sentient Beings - oil on canvas - 63 x 76 inches - 2015

Sentient Beings, oil on canvas, 63 x 76 inches, 2015

Visually complex to match complex narratives, Sentient Beings depicts astral planes within a Sci-fi matrix, in which a Chinese figurine representing the God of Longevity meets the threatening presence of a flaming head of the Flaming Future Ghost. Everything is painted as if made of incandescent neon or located under otherworldly spotlights. Rippling movement across the sky, the Flaming Future Ghost’s cloak, and the un-solid floor of the world suggests flux. A stream of blue sweeps into the glowing space. Reflected in the glassy green-lined matrix beneath, the blue bolt warps the space-time fabric of the astral plane. Within this encounter, strange beings navigate worlds whose rules and order we can only guess at. One imagines either the incipient creation or destruction of worlds. That is, in fact, the imperative of these paintings—to imagine.

Voyage of the Ancient Sea Legs - oil on canvas - 62.5 x 83 inches - 2015

Voyage of the Ancient Sea Legs, oil on canvas, 62.5 x 83 inches, 2015

Another impossible world beckons in Voyage of the Ancient Sea Legs, featuring a seahorse pulling green people housed in stacking ring toys across an underwater desert. Although everything is given to us—rippling green seaweed, pink ties, streams of bubbles, and long receding strips of desert sand, the narrative of the painting only comes alive if we truly enter the scene imaginatively. Where are the green men going? Are they twins? Are they unable to breathe underwater because they are from a different land? Answering such questions detours through complex narrative by way of childhood tropes. Despite the vehicle—a toddler’s stacking ring toy—the painting asks instead for a developed intellect to take the time to play.

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Mirage, oil on canvas mounted to panel, 10.5 x 10 inches, 2015

Innman draws on world culture for his idiosyncratic tales in paint. Symbols in Sentient Beings such as the God of Longevity and Future Ghost uses ancient symbols of the afterlife in a futuristic setting that recalls magic in the form of crystals as much as contemporary scientific theory of the structure of space-time. In Voyage of the Ancient Sea Legs, the twins are in fact referencing the Ancient Roman twins Castor and Pollux, the desert landscape contemporary sci-fi such as Dune and Stargate. Such knowledge is an adult’s. Yet the artist deliberately returns to the themes of childhood to unlock the creativity and wonder of fresh eyes. In a similar manner, adventures and new worlds unfold before the immersed viewer, suggesting that we are limited in these paintings only by our own imaginations.

More of the artist’s work on his website.

“The Forever Now” at MoMA: Death, Atemporality, and Zombies

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Installation shot with works by Kerstin Bratsch

 

Critic Peter Schjeldahl at The New Yorker dates the last contemporary painting show at MoMA to 1958, over 50 years ago. Which is to say, an exhibition of contemporary painting seems timely, if not overdue. Enter “The Forever Now: Contemporary Painting in an Atemporal World,” an exhibition of recent work by 17 contemporary painters up through April 5. Yet reviews of the show are hardly celebratory. Instead, they ring a death knell.

Installation view of The Forever Now Contemporary Painting in an Atemporal World, The Museum of Modern Art

Installation view including works by Oscar Murillo, Kerstin Bratsch, and Mary Weatherford, from left to right.

Schjeldahl writes of “dismay,” the “plight of painting,” and “crisis.” Thomas Micchelli, in his Hyperallergic review titled “The Death of Painting: All-New, 2014 Edition,” argues that the show affirms “the inability of painting to do anything surprising or new—aka painting is dead.” Schjeldahl, on the other hand, argues that painting is not dead, but rather that it has “lost symbolic force and function in a culture of promiscuous knowledge and glutting information.” Oh, well, great. From such statements, one can see why there have been no surveys of contemporary painting at MoMA. Painting is on its deathbed; somehow the medium has exhausted itself and is merely preparing to die, safely archived in the depths of MoMA’s warehouses where it can be brought out and examined as a historical curiosity.

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Installation view with Variable Foot (2014) by Matt Connors and Carlotta (2013) by Charline von Heyl.

However, if you visit “The Forever Now,” you might not glean that painting is dead–at least I didn’t. The works on view are big, bold paintings that are not afraid to embrace the medium and use color and size to declare their presence. Jam-packed as they are, they overwhelm MoMA’s space, and, unfortunately, each other. Sticking true to MoMA’s modus operendi to canonize taste, the show’s safe roster includes current art world favorites, such as the Germans Charline von Heyl and Kerstin Bratsch, Americans Julie Mehretu, Rashid Johnson, Mark Grotjahn, and Amy Sillman, and a new-favorite, the young (28-year-old) Columbian Oscar Murillo. Within them, there are some great paintings, and certainly a lot to talk about, but the curation fails to provide a good context for doing so.

9 canvases of Josh Smith FOREVERMOMA-slide-8XOE-jumbo

Nine canvases by Josh Smith.

More than review after review carping on the death of painting, what irks me most about the exhibition is its subtitle: “Contemporary Painting in an Atemporal World.” “Atemporal” seems a vague, but much cooler way of saying post-modern, while avoiding the complex burden that using the much-debated P-word would entail. Curator Laura Hoptman took the word “atemporal” from Sci-fi writer William Gibson, who, per the exhibition catalog, “in 2003 used the word atemporality to describe a new and strange state of the world in which, courtesy of the Internet, all eras seem to exist at once.” Sci-fi and the Internet would indeed provide a great context for a show of contemporary painting, but they are not strongly in evidence here. Hoptman glorifies the painting on view as zombie painting, half-dead and half-alive. While, again, the terminology is cool, the concept is thin, and all it does is reinforce the notion that nothing new can be done in painting (while presenting the acceptance of that as a new freedom).

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Installation view with three paintings by Mark Grotjahn on left.

“Atemporality” seems like purgatory, sentencing painting to the ennui of repeated gestures. But to freely use elements of art historical tradition does not have to equate to a death sentence, or even a half-death sentence. It is glib to say that these works are “atemporal,” that is, post-modern, and leave the relationship to the past with a mere reference to the Internet (capital “I”). Atemporality, zombies, and the Internet feel like a jargon-y sidestep that puts off dealing with what happens to art history when we discard the Modernist progress narrative and cult of originality. Certainly, of all places, MoMA could do a little better by the breadth of work being made today.