‘After Class’
pt. 2 Gallery is pleased to present After Class, Oakland based painter Landon Pointer’s first exhibition with the gallery. Richly textured and layered with overlapping imagery, Pointer’s paintings convene nostalgic references and touchpoints from the artist’s childhood with a painting process that incorporates a range of techniques from airbrushing to AI imaging software. The resulting paintings within After Class feel hyper contemporary as figures pulled from different reaches of the internet collide, all the while retaining a familiar haziness that gives the sense of distant collective memory.
Curiosity defines Pointer’s painting styles which morph with each work or oftentimes are all incorporated together within the same painting. The artist builds up thick impastos of modeling paste, spraying airbrushed pigment over the textured surface, the diffused softness of the airbrush contrasting with the stiff peaks and valleys of the built up facade. These textures are contrasted by large fields of color, or figures rendered in careful detail.
pt. 2 Gallery is pleased to present After Class, Oakland based painter Landon Pointer’s first exhibition with the gallery. Richly textured and layered with overlapping imagery, Pointer’s paintings convene nostalgic references and touchpoints from the artist’s childhood with a painting process that incorporates a range of techniques from airbrushing to AI imaging software. The resulting paintings within After Class feel hyper contemporary as figures pulled from different reaches of the internet collide, all the while retaining a familiar haziness that gives the sense of distant collective memory.
Curiosity defines Pointer’s painting styles which morph with each work or oftentimes are all incorporated together within the same painting. The artist builds up thick impastos of modeling paste, spraying airbrushed pigment over the textured surface, the diffused softness of the airbrush contrasting with the stiff peaks and valleys of the built up facade. These textures are contrasted by large fields of color, or figures rendered in careful detail.
Despite their purely analog feel, in conceptualizing this exhibition the artist began experimenting with an AI image making software which provided renderings from the artist’s provided prompts. What began as a way to imagine certain ideas has evolved into another component of the artist’s layered process, constructing renderings that occasionally become translated quite literally to canvas, or in other times are augmented with a further layering of images. Instead of balking at the prospect of incorporating digital ways of working as many artists do, Pointer has fully embraced this as yet another tool in his bag, seeing the use of the AI software as a true collaboration–the artist and computer going back and forth in the creation of images and their translation to canvas.