Sadly in recent months a number of good Chicago galleries have closed their doors. The latest will be Gescheidle. But currently on view is their final exhibition, a group of painting shows by Patrick W. Welch and Erling Sjovold; and their pseudonymous team, Grave Dubs & Smoov Brains (who knows which one is which). Sjovold’s "Sun, Sugar, Shadow: Trouble with Time" is in the main gallery, Welch’s "I Now Know More Than You Ever Will" in the project space and the collaborative works linking the two in the hall.

Sjovold’s paintings are eerie and confused yet cohesive. They mix colors and vistas reminiscent of memories of beautiful far off sunsets with bits and pieces of humans and other objects that for all there photographic qualities appear to be painted from life. Sjovold’s paintings are like the way some dreams can seem more real than reality. They are more mysterious than pretty paintings of chopped up photographic sources. It’s as if some people have come across a really nice set of brushstrokes and have decided to settle down there. Or in the case of Grotto park their bright red 70s Chevy amongst them. Sjovold’s colors appear unreal and impossible. How can the magentas, electric blues and neon oranges of Stunt Double (shown below) or Purple Flood come from oil paint? They look like the product of a toxic color photographic process. They radiate a luminosity that doesn’t seem possible, that seems beyond real. It can only be achieved with a strong concentrated pigment and a deft hand. In short, for all their odd imagery and aesthetic of disparate images and scales merged in paint, Sjovold’s paintings are solid good old-fashioned painted paintings. The way people describe how early moderns could take a few carefully placed dabs of paint and make it a perfect bit of sun hitting someone’s hair is the way you would describe what Sjovold is doing in a painting like Spring Fix or Wake. Except here you only have the hair, or the sunlit peaches amidst an abstract void. So there is Sargent and Manet here as much as Neo Rauch and Richard Patterson.

Patrick Welch’s work visually has a lot in common with Sjovold’s in the use of color and the mixture of abstract brushwork with representation. Which is why the collaborative works as “Smoov Brains” and “Grave Dubs” is so successful. They have a lot of differences, though too, which makes for an interesting synthesis. It’s not always easy to figure whose making which move, but it seems in the end Welch comes out on top. This is also because of his style of painting. Where seemingly arbitrary or insignificant passages of paint become something else with the addition of some careful text.

Welch is coming from a different place than Sjovold. His is a tradition of comics, art historical nods and the verbalized inner monologue. Welch’s small paintings, the size of index cards, display a further investigation of material that the artist has undertaken. When it seemed all that could be, has been, crammed into the tiny surface area his works typically exist on, Welch begins to experiment with sprayed paint and enamel, creating a denser, deeper space. Tiny clouds of color become vast nebulae or biological interactions of chemicals taking place in a Petri dish. This sort of thing occurs in I Now Understand for example. The mixing and separating pigments and mediums undergo serves to enrich the overall image, infinite networks of tiny cracks and rifts are created, producing a miniscule universe. These spaces are at once abstract, cosmic and microscopic. They become ground to signal huge emotional distances between to people. In Me and You, a network of pipe-like drips becomes vast when the teensy ‘Me’ appears on the lower left, and ‘You’ are seen on the upper right. It’s like we’ve lost each other in a sewer system. Another aspect to this work, both in its aesthetic and its content, is its affinity to vintage posters that bring up notions of totalitarian propaganda and the sensationalist marketing of horror sci-fi movies of the 50s. “THIS IS HOW IT ENDS” declares text spelled out in raindrops over an apocalyptic pink landscape. Or “SIGN!” next to a cloudy word bubble form that signifies only itself in a post structural pun. With a bitter and fatalistic tone, you might think these works are a downer, but as one work proudly proclaims, “The End is Nice.” Apropos to Gescheidle’s final showing.

-- Erik Wenzel

(Images from top to bottom: Erling Sjovold, Dusk II - Nest, oil on canvas, 30" x 30".Erling Sjovold, Stunt Double, oil on canvas, 42" x 56", 2008. Patrick W. Welch, The End is Nice, enamel and acrylic on panel, 3" x 5", 2008. Images courtesy of Gescheidle and the artists.)