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james boulton
Feb 2008 by richard speer
Painter
James Boulton’s restless, irreverent abstractions are the
product of a peripatetic life and wide-ranging artistic
influences. Born in Albuquerque, New Mexico, 32 years ago,
Boulton later moved to New Orleans, upstate New York, back to
New Mexico, and then to Portland, Oregon, before settling in
Los Angeles, where he now lives and paints. His latest body of
work, Boolean Logic, which will be shown in March at Pulliam
Deffenbaugh in Portland, finds the artist synthesizing his
teeming, wildly eclectic pastiches with a more reductive
sensibility imparted during his MFA studies at Claremont
Graduate University.
The upcoming Portland show is
significant as both a return to the city where he cut his
teeth as a painter, and a turning point toward more universal
concerns. “The influence of the Northwest,” he says, “has set
me apart a bit from artists who grew up in Los Angeles.
There’s a sort of underground ‘DIY’ approach I learned in the
warehouse-and-basement world of Portland, which is pretty
readable in the work I do, not just in terms of what I’m
thinking about conceptually, but down to the technical means
of how I apply paint to a surface.”
Those surfaces,
with their rough-and-tumble textures and Cy Twombly-like
scribbles, update Abstract Expressionist underpinnings with a
Gen X/Y obsession with graphic design, comic books, and
graffiti tagging. The works’ acid-rock-meets-hiphop
exuberance, along with Boulton’s penchant for winky titles
(Shark Attacks and Crack Cocaine, Cheerios in Space), project
a devil-may-care attitude that belies the artist’s penchant
for ruthless aesthetic inquiry and self-analysis. In 2005,
when he left misty, pedestrian-friendly Portland for sunny,
smoggy Southern California, he was fascinated by his new
home’s auto-centric commuter culture and began addressing this
phenomenon in his painting. The urban landscape of downtown
L.A., where his current studio is located, has also seeped
into his work, imparting a grittier, looser, and more
violently expressive quality. Today, three years after
arriving in L.A., he says his “relationship to the landscape
here is a lot more comfortable” than it was initially, a
comfort that has enabled him to move from a contrast-based
modus operandi to a more inwardly focused one.
The work
earmarked for the new show has its origins in Boulton’s
studies at Claremont, in particular the syntactical approach
he came to adopt toward abstract forms. “One of the things
that happened was that I realized that everything I was doing
was much more linguistic than I had been aware of. The energy
came from juxtaposing languages and forms.”
In
paintings such as Codex B and Codex C, Boulton overlays the
Euclidean language of circles, squares, and triangles with
spray-painted scrawls from a more contemporary idiom. He takes
a similar tack in the Matisse-referencing Codex A, leaving the
viewer to decide whether his aim is homage, satire, or
subversion. While the current pieces are no less kinetic than
earlier work, they are notably more elemental in their visual
vocabulary. Says the painter: “I’m going through a process of
paring down and reducing the cacophany. Whereas in the past I
might have used six or seven different applications to achieve
an effect, lately I’ve been using three or four. I’m still
getting a dissonant voice, but with a lot more
economy.”
“James Boulton: Boolean Logic: New
Paintings” runs from March 5–29, 2008 at Pulliam Deffenbaugh
Gallery, 929 NW Flanders St., Portland, OR 503) 228-6665
www.pulliamdeffenbaugh.com
Feb 2008 by richard speer
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