Dig for Fire

curated by Julia Schwartz, David Lloyd, Rochelle Botello
June 25–July 30, 2016
Eastside International / ESXLA
Los Angeles

from the exhibition announcement:

Dig For Fire presents work by artists who share the pairing of painterly form with intuitive processes, and articulate arrested states of becoming with those forms and processes. Rochelle Botello’s sculptures are the word made flesh, abstract forms of chaotic color and pattern reaching and stretching into the third dimension. Whether they are sculptures becoming paintings, or paintings becoming sculptures, their in-betweeness is declared with a tactile language of collaged chromatic contrast and pattern reminiscent of digitally-produced camouflage, the supermarket detergent aisle, and Dubuffet. The strange specimens submitted by David Lloyd reveal instances of primordial image formation. Flourishes of illusion function alongside atmospheric washes of color, taped off patches of mark-making, and more, building up to an interior visual logic that is felt more than deduced. A felt logic also describe the blurs of becoming that are Julia Schwartz’s paintings. Slashes, strokes, and dabs of airy greens, yellows, and blues read almost as landscapes foregrounded by drawn suggestions of figurative presence. In all the work, the viewer is confronted with an original mediation of the artists' responses, unfiltered and taking shape by their own hand, a record and documentation of earthly, promethean desires.