Glutton for PWNishment

Bad Desktop Wallpaper, originally uploaded by spraynardkreuger.

Carlos Jimenez didn’t get the message that art wasn’t his forte. Maybe he’s ambitious. His storefront on North Avenue in the Wicker Park neighborhood would lead you to think so. Obviously, his aim is high, either way. After all, he uses the “old master’s technique,” as his website asserts.

Still, his grotesquely colorful, abstract paintings have more in common with Microsoft Windows desktop backgrounds and bad ‘80s prog rock album covers than Goya or Rembrandt. That is, unless you are referring to the packaging for the Latin food brand or the toothpaste.

Just about everything about Jimenez’s work is grandiose, over-the-top and otherworldly. His paintings are about themes as universal as the “beautiful representation of earthy essences.” They are bestowed with evocative, visionary titles like Jazz Flowers, Red Genesis, The Voyage and Phoenix. It’s easy to see where Jimenez is taking us – probably somewhere magical in outer space, possibly on a sparkly starship.

Phoenix in particular showcases Jimenez’s predilection toward “dimensions and parallel universes.” The painting might be alternately titled Floating, Crimson Pinball Watches a Sunset on a Vacation in Scottsdale, Arizona in a more honest universe. In the foreground, a luminescent, reflective marble alights what looks like a hazy, orange mountain range. Clearly, perspective is a problem here. Is the pinball rising to meet the rays of the sun? Is it actually emanating these rays?

Attraction, or Bath Beads’ March to the Apocalypse, is another study in the versatility of hovering, red globes. Dozens of glimmering spheres ascend to the upper extreme of the canvas toward a mysterious, golden glowing light. It could be a sea of cough drops. It could be a horde of bouncy balls careening down to a certain death. Mostly, this cartoonish depiction just makes for trite viewing.

Red Horizon is a clear choice to complete Jimenez’s “abstract red shapes moving around and doing things” series. A flowing plateau of cherry and strawberry Twizzlers cascade into a spackled marigold plane and give the painting a strange sense of dynamic motion.

Obviously, there is a demand for multi-tonal, ethereal mentalscapes such as these. How else would Jimenez maintain such an impressive spread? Hospitals, institutional office spaces and spacey, new age art patrons have empty walls with space to fill. There are those among us that need a scenic image of what an Enya, Yanni or Enigma song might look like.

If anything, Jimenez’s treatment of light in his colorful homages to geometry is, after all, visually interesting. He creates a glowing warmth around the cascading spheres, rods and rectangles that punctuate his not-of-this-landscapes. Sunburst Nebula, while dubiously titled, creates the deep, hot appearance of a shining sun or moon or star.

The Jazz Flowers series also contains accessible works, highlighted by fields of dotted floral scenery. Swirling clouds in a blue sky hover above the grass, buds and blossoms. While the image of shards of flora may not be the kind of art that shapes political or cultural discourse, it certainly is pretty.

But the nagging sense of cheesiness and contrived outer space imagery of Jimenez’s works make them look more like posters or sci-fi book sleeves than paintings. Or maybe the cover of a silly calendar. He may be aiming for the celestial with his many nebulas, stars, floating orbs, planets and explosive fields of color but his paintings are not out of this world.

If Carlos Jimenez is taking us far away in his red spaceship to an orange planet with foggy hills and floating balls, he better bring enough jet fuel to take us back to earth. You can only stand so much time inside an Asia album cover in a field of golden marbles before turning into L. Rob Hubbard or a glimmering space alien. Jimenez might not be a capable painter but he may find success in a variety of other vocations: pulp novelist, greeting card designer, ball collector. The possibilities, like the universe, are endless.

DISCLAIMER: The photo above is not Carlos Jimenez’s work. But you can compare and contrast with his real paintings at your leisure, since it IS a Microsoft wallpaper image.

  

Jerez the Clown, painted by Higgins. This is just one magical work on display at the MOBA. Photo credit: Chris Devers.

Contemporary art and the entire culture that surrounds it obviously needs to be taken down a few pegs. From the inscrutable and pompous ashes of conceptual art, (blank canvasses, blinking light installations, wow, how meaningful, how abstract), comes a museum that counters the idea of art regarding itself so highly.

The Museum of Bad Art, housed in two galleries in the Boston area, was first founded in 1993 by yard sale and dumpster art scavengers. After a decade and a half of growth, the museum has earned its rightful place as a true archival of the worst in technique, execution and missed points in theme and motif.

From the get-go, you realize that the paladins of awful art that run this museum have quite the sense of humor. Even the museum’s moniker, its highfalutin acronym, MOBA, seems to poke fun at the heavy-handedness of those who fancy themselves visual art aficionados. The MOBA has a whimsy, a taste of snappy, bubblegum fun that counters the girthy, starchy meals that most museums serve up.

Still, this museum doesn’t seek to be spiteful. Although it exhibits and admittedly seeks out terrible works, the MOBA’s goal isn’t “to mock the artists as much as making fun of art taking itself too seriously,” says Curator-in-Chief Michael Frank.The MOBA carefully chooses art, seeking out that which has been “made in earnest, but something has gone wrong.” Oftentimes, this takes the form of an over-the-top image. Still, “poor technique alone doesn’t make something bad art,” says Frank.

Surprisingly, when artists discover they’ve been bestowed the honor of exhibition of at the MOBA, most are overjoyed and honored. “[An artist has discovered the were in the museum] a number of times,” says Frank. There was only one incident in which a woman objected to her work being displayed and the MOBA promptly took the piece down and hasn’t put it on display since.

While some might deem the MOBA to be something that subverts the idea of proper, revered museum space, its mission is not that divorced from more traditional institutions. “The goal [of the MOBA] is for someone to appreciate [the art]. It’s no different from any other museum in that respect,” says Frank.

Still, with gems like Peter the Kitty, with its intense attention to cat emotional symbolism and the evocative usage of color shown in Inspiration, its difficult to imagine a sobering trip to the MOBA. As Frank puts it, “if the image isn’t compelling, I’m not interested.” And what could be more compelling than a contemplative, agitated feline?

Curlz Runs Amok, originally uploaded by spraynardkreuger.

I have had just about enough with fonts these days. The accessability of programs like Word, Excel and other cutesy Microsoft programs that enable the “every man” to dress up or personalize his products and documents is downright ridiculous. I don’t know how many times I’ve seen Papyrus on a dining menu. I can’t count the times I’ve seen Curlz on soccer mom-wear. Please people. Leave the fonts to the experts.

I love the whole, “let’s make everyone equal” via techonology trend that’s been rearing its ugly head since the mid-90s. Yes, even you, Rebecca Banhart, mother of five from Pensacola, can be a t-shirt designer. All you need is a glue gun, a Geocities webpage,  a Microsoft “design” program and some ingenuity. Oh yes.

We see these fonts on a daily basis. I’m not talking the ubiquity of Helvetica or the tell-tale term paperiness of Times New Roman. I’m talking about Comic Sans, the “fun-loving” font, the aforementioned “class” of Papyrus, or the abundance of Microsoft script fonts sullying wedding invitations everywhere. Just a tip, guys. Script fonts can’t be read unless they’re at least in a 40 point type. It doesn’t make you seem “classy” or “refined” to slap a script font on a crappy car dealership logo. Just sayin’. 

Kristen ITC also really burns a hole in my soul. “Hey, I’m so fun. I used Kristen ITC. Can’t you sense my irreverent attitude by my usage of this girly handwriting-esque font on my resume? I used a nice Excel template. Can’t you tell? I was the president of my state school’s chapter of Alpha Beta Zeta Camda Flamba Bababamavadaa Pi. I know how to organize house meetings and I also manage to maintain my whimsical femininity.” Sorry, Ashley Jenkins. You’re not getting that Corporate Management Project Synthesis Assistant job. You used Kristen ITC.