Michael Alvarez: Good Looking Out
Matthew Brown is pleased to present Good Looking Out, a solo exhibition of recent paintings by Michael Alvarez. Born and raised in Los Angeles, Alvarez draws from the wellspring of his own experience living and working in the city to produce intimate yet sociological paintings that capture the particularities of civic life within the vast metropolis. Steeped in nostalgia, the over twenty works on view offer a closely-observed, hyperreal reconstruction of the city: its people, its culture, its politics, and the public and domestic spaces that constitute its visual landscape.
Influenced by graffiti culture and its transformation of the urban sprawl, Alvarez uses a combination of oil and spray paint to build up multilayered, diffuse surfaces which oscillate between the uncanny daze of a dream and the misty nostalgia of a memory. In preparation for his social-scapes, Alvarez undertakes multiple site visits, traversing the terrain to experience it from every possible angle. Always towing a digital camera, he takes dozens of reference photographs of the scene to capture both key features and the most minute of details.
Back in the studio, the fragments of his memories and reference images coalesce to form diffuse compositions that are reminiscent of a fading wall tag or a lossy digital image. Inextricably linked both to memory and to low-res photographs, Alvarez鈥檚 social-scapes achieve an impressionistic openness by way of temporal and technological mediation.
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Matthew Brown is pleased to present Good Looking Out, a solo exhibition of recent paintings by Michael Alvarez. Born and raised in Los Angeles, Alvarez draws from the wellspring of his own experience living and working in the city to produce intimate yet sociological paintings that capture the particularities of civic life within the vast metropolis. Steeped in nostalgia, the over twenty works on view offer a closely-observed, hyperreal reconstruction of the city: its people, its culture, its politics, and the public and domestic spaces that constitute its visual landscape.
Influenced by graffiti culture and its transformation of the urban sprawl, Alvarez uses a combination of oil and spray paint to build up multilayered, diffuse surfaces which oscillate between the uncanny daze of a dream and the misty nostalgia of a memory. In preparation for his social-scapes, Alvarez undertakes multiple site visits, traversing the terrain to experience it from every possible angle. Always towing a digital camera, he takes dozens of reference photographs of the scene to capture both key features and the most minute of details.
Back in the studio, the fragments of his memories and reference images coalesce to form diffuse compositions that are reminiscent of a fading wall tag or a lossy digital image. Inextricably linked both to memory and to low-res photographs, Alvarez鈥檚 social-scapes achieve an impressionistic openness by way of temporal and technological mediation.
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Like many of the great Los Angeles painters of his generation, his peers, Michael Alvarez is an incredible observationalist.
Collaging debris culled during urban excursions, Michael Alvarez portrays the liminal spaces of his city, from freeway underpasses to public parks.
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