All is Lost
All is lost! -Christopher Sperandio | Selected Works
December 7 2024 / January 11th 2025
Overview:
EXIT, PURSUED BY A BEAR
“In movies and television, the “all is lost” moment is when the protagonist is at their lowest. It’s the hopelessness at the end of act two in a three-act play. The work exhibited here reflects that vibe. They are from a much larger series, including leering wolves, skulls, shadows, closed doors, explosions, cops, and plenty of hooded or grinning weirdos. Simply, the work reflects a state of anxiety over the rise of authoritarianism, political extremism and violence.
The pieces are ink and synthetic gamboge brushed onto watercolor paper. Gamboge has a dour history. Naturally occurring gamboge pigment comes from the resin of Garcinia genus trees found in Asia. During the reign of the Khmer Rouge, the gamboge trade in Cambodia was interrupted due to the number of bullet casings mixed in with the tree sap, tainting the pigment. Gamboge was paint made from the killing fields. Natural gamboge is also poisonous and not lightfast. Synthetic substitutes for this ancient paint have since appeared. This orange color was chosen, as opposed to, say, cadmium red, as a direct reference to that criminal, Donald Trump and his Christofascist MAGA movement. It also has a technical function. The color quickly swaps out for a different color or pattern in Photoshop. In this case, the imposition of a damaged halftone. The result makes the printed comics look vintage, mirroring old newspaper comics. A painterly halftone, you say? Google “Craftint.”
This daily art practice started in May 2020 as a hedge against mental illness during the pandemic. Galleries and museums closed. Instagram was the best way to engage with others. It was the spring that those cops murdered George Floyd. The daily Instagram posts have evolved. Four years and more than 4,000 agitprop works later, the once purely digital daily pieces are now analog - and it shows. Cludgy lines and watercolor that escape its allotted boundaries replace the computer-assisted smoothness. This frailty is their strength — no person will confuse them for Artificial Intelligence. The original works lack the text and word balloons accompanying them online. The pieces get produced in batches, but the text comes digitally later. The works are exhibited in their naked state and reproduced in this book in their final state. When the fascists speak, the future fractures and crumbles. In the middle of July 2024, there was a feeling of panic among the Left in the United States. This fear of rising fascism yielded a side project, a series of small ink and watercolor paintings. These paintings result from a thread picked up from research from before the pandemic and dropped as the world changed. At first, a formal investigation into the construction of comic book panels, the impulse clicked into place and suddenly made sense in post-pandemic America. Environments of destruction and chaos taken from the backgrounds of public domain comics, specifically comics with titles like “Witches Tales” [sic], are repainted but with the people and word balloons eliminated. The paintings depict forest fires, sabotage, pollution, floods, avalanches, and arriving ships carrying plague or, even worse, religion. They are the naturalist landscapes of the Barbizon school viewed through a lens of mass production and authoritarianism. This exhibition is a tale told by witches, frozen before the story arc rebounds, made at the “all is lost” point in American history.”
By Christopher Sperandio