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{"id":3237,"date":"2021-08-30T18:02:57","date_gmt":"2021-08-30T23:02:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/esse.ca\/the-afterlifes-painting\/"},"modified":"2025-10-21T14:05:21","modified_gmt":"2025-10-21T19:05:21","slug":"the-afterlifes-painting","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/the-afterlifes-painting\/","title":{"rendered":"The Afterlife\u2019s Painting"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Artspace Magazine<\/em> 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<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 2 <\/a> - Walter Robinson, \u201cFlipping and the Rise of Zombie Formalism,\u201d Artspace Magazine<\/em>, April 3, 2014, accessible online.<\/span> Robinson remarked that the studio production of such individuals often adopts a \u201csimulacrum of originality\u201d 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 \u201cpremieres.\u201d Through a sequence of superficial milestones, Smith was the first to use paint-filled fire extinguishers to execute his Rain Paintings<\/em> (2012), and Kassay premiered the electroplating process on canvas to produce his Silver Monochromes<\/em> (2012).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Jerry Saltz more boorishly labels work from this motley crew \u201cCrapstraction,\u201d the fast-food<\/em> equivalent of ready-to-consume art, supported by thin, nondescript statements that provide a brief sense of security for unsophisticated buyers, impatient to incorporate art into their investment portfolios. As this detractor insists, such undead art makers no longer challenge aesthetic canons but merely reawaken abstraction\u2019s glory days, in order to flip more works and see them bubble up from one art speculator to the next.3<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 3 <\/a> - Jerry Saltz, \u201cZombies on the Walls: Why Does So Much New Abstraction Look the Same?,\u201d Vulture<\/em>, June 17, 2014, accessible online.<\/span> Be that as it may, Saltz\u2019s brash comments seem overstated, hard to apply as a critic in Canada, especially since so many artists here revisit the accomplishments of formalism without necessarily fitting neatly into the travesties of undead art.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Tammi Campbell<\/strong> <\/em>
\u201cLET\u2019S BOTH GIVE IT A TRY\u201d, <\/em>Framed with Bubblewrap and Packing Tape, 73,7 \u00d7 90,2 cm, 2021.
Photo: Matthew Kroening, courtesy of the artist & Anat Ebgi, Los Angeles <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
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Tammi Campbell<\/strong>
\u201cI\u2019M COMPLETELY EXHAUSTED\u201d, <\/em>Framed with Bubblewrap and Packing Tape, 73,7 \u00d7 90,2 cm, 2021.
Photo: Matthew Kroening, courtesy of the artist & Anat Ebgi, Los Angeles<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
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Tammi Campbell<\/strong>
Red Curve, wrapped,<\/em> 160 \u00d7 121,9 cm, 2019.
Photo: Michael Underwood, courtesy of the artist & Anat Ebgi, Los Angeles<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Numerous painters flirt with the act of premiering that Robinson outlined, including painter Tammi Campbell when she focuses on executing \u201ceffects\u201d more than outlining forms or ideas. She demonstrates virtuoso trompe l\u2019oeil skills as she mimics all kinds of packaging that usually surround art in transit, such as corrugated cardboard and parcel tape. But her most recent acrylic paintings escape this one- dimensional effect, when seemingly reviving modern masterpieces from their storage spaces. Adding fake bubble wrap over copies of artworks from a bygone era, such as Josef Albers\u2019s colour studies, Ellsworth Kelly\u2019s shaped canvases, and other twentieth-century classics, Campbell implies an outsider\u2019s view of the canons of a male-dominated history as she highlights the external layers of art objects, which are present only between two exhibitions. This tactic brilliantly emphasizes the hidden actions of art labourers and the commodification of collectible paintings; yet the heroic perfectionism that Campbell devotes to rendering these illusions makes us wonder if she is distancing herself from or identifying herself with the cited artworks. The creative appropriation also questions Campbell\u2019s adherence to a formalist tradition, as the famed paintings now belong to the realm of recognizable signifiers. The bubble-wrap illusionist comes to terms with some of these conditions by titling her latest solo show, at Anat Ebgi Gallery in Los Angeles, Boring Art<\/em>. Paraphrasing John Baldessari\u2019s 1971 piece I Will Not Make Any More Boring Art<\/em>, she acknowledges the ironic twist in which the non-spectacular ennui of packages should no longer be avoided as external constituents of artworks but instead be sought after. This deceptive boredom in zombie aesthetics, after Campbell, effectively reincarnates the features of banality<\/em> previously seen in Pop and Neo-Conceptual art.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Perhaps in resonance with Campbell\u2019s slow transition to figuration with her many nods to art history, the representational wing of undead art was officially recognized in 2020 by ARTnews commentator Alex Greenberger as Zombie Figuration.4<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 4 <\/a> - Alex Greenberger, \u00ab First There Was Zombie Formalism\u2014Now There\u2019s Zombie Figuration \u00bb, ARTnews<\/em>, 9 juillet 2020, accessible en ligne.<\/span> This alternative trend is equally charged with flimsy content and a notable strong-hold on New York City\u2019s art scene. Painters such as William N. Copley, Joan Brown, and Neil Jenney borrow heavily from the deadpan brushstrokes of Giorgio de Chirico, Ren\u00e9 Magritte\u2019s unfamiliar encounters, the mystery but not the Freudian depth of Salvador Dali, and other Surrealist crutches. Other parallels have been noted with Peter Saul\u2019s political satires, without his problematic chauvinism. Indeed, in Zombie Figuration we find a refreshingly high proportion of female artists. Issy Wood, who successfully juggles the jobs of painter and pop singer, parodies entertainment figures, including her many portraits of Joan Rivers in various states of disarray. Similar to Campbell with her formalist predecessors, Emily Mae Smith is whipping out a panoply of derivative artworks, making them her own by swapping the human subjects for anthropomorphic broomsticks, as found in Disney\u2019s Fantasia<\/em>. In Smith\u2019s 2016 oil on linen Honest Espionage<\/em>, such sweepers are standing in the same pose as Mr. Presley once did in Warhol\u2019s iconic 1963 Double Elvis<\/em> silkscreen. In Greenberger\u2019s estimation, such works lack \u201cany sense of subtlety or nuance.\u201d But as sardonic and vapid as her works may appear at first glance, I find that Smith\u2019s lowbrow and non-technical aesthetic actually triggers a complex web of commentary \u2014 between iconoclasm and institutional critique \u2014 that simultaneously demonstrates her breadth of knowledge in the traditions of painting, and demands an equally broad cultural baggage from the viewer, in order for her supposedly trivial punchlines to work. In other words, if viewers don\u2019t know the work being satirized, they won\u2019t get the joke.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

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Joani Tremblay<\/strong>
What Is Real?, <\/em>91,4 \u00d7 76,2 cm, 2020.
Photo: Jean-Michael Seminaro, courtesy of the artist & Galleria MLF | Marie-Laure Fleisch, Brussels<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

When looking for Zombie Figuration in Canada, one might be tempted to drop names like Montr\u00e9al-born Mathieu Malouf\u2019s large-scale oil paintings that mash up Muppets, Gremlins, MTV, soft porn, and other mass media paraphernalia. But as much as his works fit the overall gist of Zombie Figuration, which has also been subjected to Greenberger\u2019s critique, Malouf\u2019s long absence from any local scene makes it difficult to include him in my Canada-centric review. Up-and-coming painter Joani Tremblay might soon follow a similar path to Malouf, since setting up her part-time studio in Brooklyn and enjoying a string of shows in Brussels, Stockholm, and Los Angeles. In the meantime, her presence is still strongly felt within Canadian galleries such as Projet Pang\u00e9e (Montr\u00e9al), Latitude 53 (Edmonton), and Zalucky Contemporary (Toronto). Through soft gradients and textured lines, Tremblay\u2019s awkward renderings echo the skills of an autodidact, without the inherent naivet\u00e9. One might be tempted to describe her series Nature as Political<\/em> (2020) as unfinished portrait paintings. The loosely detailed foliage, fruits, and mountainous skylines meander on her tableaux, perceived as decorative backgrounds waiting for important persons to be drawn in. While we wait, in vain, for the materialization of a centrepiece, our eyes slip across patches of shrubberies, slide on the faraway landscapes, as we are culturally trained to not pay attention to such ornaments. With this impression of emptiness, Tremblay raises our awareness of such hierarchies in the pictorial realm, reshuffling the pecking order of signs as we are looking at her work, and the visual experience of this revision is surprisingly agreeable.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Joani Tremblay<\/strong>
Paper folds around your view,<\/em> 121,9 \u00d7 101,6 cm, 2021.
Photo: Jean-Michael Seminaro, courtesy of the artist & Harper\u2019s Gallery, New York<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
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Joani Tremblay<\/strong>
Enter the valley, <\/em>91,4 \u00d7 76,2 cm, 2021.
Photo: Jean-Michael Seminaro, courtesy of the artist & Harper\u2019s Gallery, New York <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

Even though critics struggle with the somewhat petty claims of Zombie Figuration, and its detached attitude, the departure from ponderous and scholarly art statements does feel invigorating. The unpretentious approach of New York\u2019s rising blue-chip painters, like that of Canada\u2019s pigment and brush jockeys, seems consistent with their push to dismantle, or at least gaslight, the authority of established art canons. This posture is also found in other established artists in Canada, such as Toronto\u2019s Shary Boyle. Her drawings in particular partake in citing pop culture, and their deliberately casual execution negates the usually assertive, technically savvy, and labour-intensive approaches of macho art forms. Also, when performing non-productive deeds like slumber, masturbation, and masquerade, the figures in Boyle\u2019s works on paper \u2014 like Tremblay\u2019s backgrounds\u2014 draw us into a process of relearning what to label as shallow and what to throw in the deep end.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Tammi Campbell<\/strong>
Boring Art,<\/em> installation view, Anat Ebgi, Los Angeles, 2019.
Photo: Michael Underwood, courtesy of the artist & Anat Ebgi, Los Angeles <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
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Shary Boyle<\/strong>
Troll,<\/em> 74 \u00d7 95 cm, 2019.
Photo: courtesy of the artist<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

At the end of the day, the decision to dismiss zombie aesthetics, or not, will stay subjective. Personally, I prefer to delay my condemnation of this emergent movement as a whole, finding more pleasure in discovering diamonds in the rough and actually hopeful that this genre will grow into a legitimate alternative to research-based academic art. Especially in Canada, where so many peer-reviewed grants and committee-juried exhibition opportunities are forcing artists to overthink their practice, the philistine allure of zombie art might balance out the universe. However, if I were to draw connections between Campbell\u2019s boredom, Tremblay\u2019s emptiness, and Boyle\u2019s idleness, their common aim to revitalize sidelined visual tropes, in sync with a revitalizing of sidelined gender roles, is palpable. Soon enough, the derogatory connotations of zombie painters could also flip into a positive, empowering term, just like Minimalism has now shed its deprecating critique of \u201cminimal art content.\u201d5<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 5 <\/a> - Richard Wollheim, \u201cMinimal Art,\u201d Arts Magazine<\/em> 39, no. 4 (January 1965): 26 \u2014 32. 26-32.<\/span> In all fairness, ArtReview<\/em> placed Black Lives Matter at the top of their list of cultural influencers of 2020 to show that art is not all cosmetics, and most institutions, if slow to tackle it, are ready for systemic change and social justice.6<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 6 <\/a> - See \u201cPower 100,\u201d ArtReview<\/em>, December 2020, accessible online; Indigenous art curator Candice Hopkins is the only Canadian to make this list.<\/span> Rough around the edges, zombie artists might look like court jesters in comparison, but their tacit critique of the status quo from a more convoluted, less frontal encounter remains not negligible.<\/p>\n\n\n

Joani Tremblay, Oli Sorenson, Tammi Campbell<\/div>
Joani Tremblay, Oli Sorenson, Tammi Campbell<\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"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 [NOTE count=1]painters.[\/NOTE][REF count=1]\u201cThe Idea of Painting,\u201d Esse 76 (Fall 2012).[\/REF] From this impression of limbo between life and death, my text naturally fashioned the analogy of the undead zombie, in which painters stumbled upon artistic recognition under the spell of greater market influences. Coincidentally, soon after this article came out, new trends started cascading out of New York to shore up young artists making shallow yet commercially successful paintings. First coined as Zombie Formalism, this abstract fad was soon followed by a more illustrative sequel, unearthed as Zombie Figuration.<\/br>","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":2209,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[882],"tags":[],"numeros":[338],"disciplines":[],"statuts":[],"checklist":[],"auteurs":[922],"artistes":[1845,1816],"thematiques":[],"type_post":[],"class_list":["post-3237","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-post","numeros-102-reseeing-painting","auteurs-oli-sorenson-en","artistes-joani-tremblay-en","artistes-tammi-campbell-en"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3237","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3237"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3237\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":271595,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3237\/revisions\/271595"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2209"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3237"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3237"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3237"},{"taxonomy":"numeros","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/numeros?post=3237"},{"taxonomy":"disciplines","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/disciplines?post=3237"},{"taxonomy":"statuts","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/statuts?post=3237"},{"taxonomy":"checklist","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/checklist?post=3237"},{"taxonomy":"auteurs","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/auteurs?post=3237"},{"taxonomy":"artistes","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/artistes?post=3237"},{"taxonomy":"thematiques","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/thematiques?post=3237"},{"taxonomy":"type_post","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/type_post?post=3237"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}