Steve Canaday
Apocalypse Now and Then: O Canaday! O Pompeii!
Black, Blacker, Blackest
April 18 - May 23, 2009

In his last couple of shows, L.A.-based painter Steve Canaday managed to stir up a fair bit of controversy with his cheerfully explicit portraits of ex-girlfriends sporting grotesquely enlarged secondary (and occasionally primary) sexual characteristics, and his even more aggressively adolescent depictions of drug-fueled hot-rod chickie-runs at the Heart of Darkness set in the postindustrial ruins of the artist’s hometown, Detroit. But underlying this deliberately provocative lowbrow narrative content (not to mention outré art-historical references and painting techniques that alienated more than one of my painterly acquaintances), Canaday was deploying a rock-solid compositional sophistication and material engagement that belied his faux-primitivism.

Recent fans of Canaday’s prankish teen-noir pictorialism will probably be utterly baffled by his latest oeuvre — collectively on view as Black, Blacker, Blackest, the inaugural show at Parker Jones. Jones, the latter-day gallery director of Black Dragon Society, has reconfigured that defunct Chinatown mainstay’s young, largely UCLA-connected stable in the former digs of David Kordansky — just in time for the imminent art-market resurgence! Canaday — whose American Id-isms (like those of fellow Angelo-Michiganders Jim Shaw and Mike Kelley) are better appreciated in Europe than locally — would be a pretty ballsy choice for a first show even if he had stuck to a greatest-hits sampling of babes and Rat Finks. Instead, Canaday has pulled the comfy pictorial rug out from his late-Modernist structuralism by presenting an exhibit of only slightly impure abstractions.

Those familiar with Canaday’s work from back around the turn of the millennium will recognize this move as a periodic return to the abstract roots from which his lurid imagery blossomed — a consolidation of the lessons gleaned from immersion in skanky figuration. And a rich, black volcanic compost it yields indeed. Consisting of a half-dozen medium-size shaped canvases embossed with coarse monochromatic black-on-black grids of rectangles in high relief, like buttons on a metastasizing cell phone, the tread of a shredded monster truck tire, or an aerial map of a charred cityscape — Canaday’s Black, Blacker, Blackest suite possesses a physicality and gravitas only hinted at in his earlier work.

Highlighted with satellite night vision–green patches and halos, constructed in vague resemblance to automotive fragments, and occasionally sprouting an antenna from a top stretcher bar, these cartoonishly postindustrial geometric abstractions flirt with figuration just enough to spoil their reading as doctrinaire Minimalism, while retaining their prerogative as remarkably decorative objects. Call it Late American Imperial — sumptuous and unique material commodities that seem to embody a stripped-down symbolic divination of their host culture’s impending demise — the last feeble flickering of the fluorescent-green ghost before it becomes all machine, the last sputtering transmission from VALIS to penetrate the Black Iron Prison.

— Doug Harvey