In case you hadn't noticed, the world of art has gotten turned up- side down. Even a few years ago, descriptive words like facile and juvenile were considered pejorative, especially in criticism. But for today's young painters-whose works are chockablock with cheeky references to video games, bad 1970s design, and episodes of South Park-the terms have come to signify gold stars of approval. In this topsy-turvy construct, bad art is good art. But the "new" approach raises the same question that has plagued antiart intellectuals for generations-i.e., is there a there there? For the boyishly handsome Adam Ball, a bright light on the British art scene with his gorgeous Pop Art-inspired paintings of foliage and landscapes, the answer is yes, but there is a footnote.
In 2002, early in Ball's career, a newspaper photographer shot him working shirtless and exposing his modelworthy abs while he was installing a public artwork in London's Golden Square near Piccadilly Circus. The mammoth painting, The Tree, won him as many admirers as his own trunk did. Subsequently, Ball found himself convinced to lose his laundry again for another shoot. As humorous as he considered the escapades-and as memorable as the pictures were to the public-he eventually realized that his physique was on the verge of overshadowing his art. "I'll never do that again," the 29-year-old says dryly. In the last few years, Ball has been growing and covering up, letting his art-in all its impassioned yet kitschy glory-do the talking. With nature paintings and cut-paper projects, Ball has taken the iconography of banal 1970s graphics and newly vested them with an abundance of sentiment and seriousness. Think of it as an episode of The Brady Bunch, written and filmed by Ingmar Bergman.
His recent show at New York's Paul Kasmin Gallery is a case in point, a lovely suite of tree-filled landscapes, which at a distance suggest the silk-screened posters and wallpaper that once adorned doctors' offices. Your first response is to give the work high marks for irony and then, perhaps, move on. Yet as you approach, you see that they're not silkscreens at all, but paintings. Move in even closer, and you see that they're not quickly or even amateurishly crafted, but in fact carefully and classically lay- ered, bringing to mind a word one hardly associates with the nose- thumbing stance of the Irony School: painterly. "The way I apply paint is actually very arduous," Ball explains. "The paintings are very built up, so the layers really catch the light, and you see the history of the making of the painting." Ball begins by going out into the woods on his own, armed with a digital camera, and finds setups that fire his pastoral imagination. He then downloads the images into his computer and, with the help of photo-editing software, reduces the shapes and colors to simple, stark, high-contrast components. It's a process that, despite the high-tech methodology, seems almost Victorian in its painstaking work, and almost Japanese in its passion for beautifully contrived simplicity. "I'm trying to find the structure in the image," says Ball, who has cited the repeating patterns in wallpaper as inspiration. "I'm not interested in old-school notions of landscape. I'm not trying to represent a place, a time, a color, or a state of weather." His solution has been to cross 1870s Impressionism with 1970s Pop Art. And if you think they're an uneasy fit, well, for Ball, uneasy does it.
Despite the laboriously detailed work and his desire to communicate something about the temporality of nature, his art could be mistaken, superficially at least, for something one of Charlie's Angels might have hung on her living room wall. "I like that tension," he says. "It's a fine line that I quite enjoy treading." Amid his rich oil-and-acrylic paint colors, he has even added washes of glitter and glue, the same kind that children use in craft class. Says Ball, "I like the kitsch factor." At the same time, he's also become interested in the fastidious craft of cutting paper by hand to create images. This torturous technique- no slipups!-has given him new respect for craftsmen, like the famed kilim weavers of Asia Minor, who do such slow and careful work. Ball hopes the process invests his art with gravitas. "When you see what goes into these pieces, knowing that I cut it out, that there's no com- puterized laser, no studio assistant, just me," says Ball, "it's obvious I'm serious about what I am making." In other words, you should mean what you say, even if you don't really mean it.
