Analog Paintings

Leo Koenig Inc. is pleased to announce the opening of a solo exhibition of new paintings by Jeff Elrod. For this exhibition Elrod continues with what he calls “Analog” painting. In his own words, Elrod makes “handmade copies of a digital original.” Starting with an elementary drawing program, Jeff begins with “frictionless drawings” made with a computer mouse. The movements required to create the drawings are very similar to those hand gestures used to operate some computer games. A smooth detached aesthetic arises where the mouse, instead of being a more precise tool for rendering, initiates a randomness that totally subverts the accuracy of digital technologies. At the same time, the shallow, compressed sense of space that we can only associate with the computer screen emphasizes a new painterly space. Applying the resulting images and words onto canvas becomes a process of not only applying paint to the surface but a dropping off, deleting of information. With Elrod’s practice of taping off and painting, the deleted information becomes the image, the absence becomes the essence.

Elrod’s paintings reveal clues to his many, varied influences. He evokes famed graphics innovator, Sister Mary Carita while incorporating the literary device known as “cut up” creating a kind of digital collage of information and form. Titles reveal yet another layer of information “Delete Yourself” is at once funny and darkly existential. “Missing Time” could easily refer to the stress of modern life as much as it could to that odd feeling of not knowing where one had spent the last 24 hours after a particularly raucous party. “Flatlands” refers to an obscure 19th century sci fi novel written by Edwin Abbot and described as a “Geometric Love Story.” As a group, these titles, imagery and even color collude to suggest a frenetic free association that is perhaps closer to synapses firing in ones mind than to the more reflexive qualities of surfing the internet. Ultimately, the paintings resonate visually and formally as a fresh incarnation of American Post-war painting.

Jeff Elrod’s work has most recently appeared in “Bitstreams,” at the Whitney Museum of American Art and “Glee:Painting Now,” at the Aldrich Museum and The Palm Beach Institute of Contemporary Art as well as the Kemper Museum in Kansas City. Jeff Elrod currently lives and works in New York City.