The Afterlife’s Painting

Artspace Magazine critic Walter Robinson first uttered the catchphrase Zombie Formalism in a 2014 article, to speak of the reductive, quasi-Greenbergian aesthetic of Lucien Smith, Jacob Kassay, Oscar Murillo, and like-minded up-and-coming painters.² 2 - Walter Robinson, “Flipping and the Rise of Zombie Formalism,” Artspace Magazine, April 3, 2014, accessible online. Robinson remarked that the studio production of such individuals often adopts a “simulacrum of originality” by overlooking the teachings of postmodernity to debase novelty as a bankrupt value. But Zombie Formalists have not quite restored the pursuit of the new in art as much as inducted a need to hold “premieres.” Through a sequence of superficial milestones, Smith was the first to use paint-filled fire extinguishers to execute his Rain Paintings (2012), and Kassay premiered the electroplating process on canvas to produce his Silver Monochromes (2012).