Various Small Fires is pleased to present, unimodern gondolieri, the first Los Angeles solo exhibition by Argentinean artist Diego Singh (b. Salta, Argentina, lives and works in Miami and New York).
The artist’s signature “denim” paintings, Rothko-esque in their scale and oceanic masses of pigment, will compete for wall space with his more recent text-based “captcha” series. Some of these paintings have taken nearly a decade to produce, marked by countless luminescent layers of paint that overwhelm the viewer. In the cult of modernist aesthetics, the two-dimensional picture plane has the potential to be a site for spiritual transcendence. Like many heroic modernist paintings, Singh’s canvases too possess the rare capacity to harbor the sublime within its linen shores.
Emotional outpour, however, is outlawed in Singh’s world–determintately stunted in exchange for a state of repression. Upon closer inspection, the intoxicating layers of midnight blue reveal themselves as merely painted representations of denim. The “denimization” of Singh’s paintings take place at the very end of his process, where years of painted layers are treated with a final coating of blue that seals the surface like ointment on an open wound. But why is the viewer forced to face the banal reality of denim–that ultimate index of the everyday? Through denim, Singh desacralizes the site of transcendence and sends subjectivity back into a state of confusion, delivering yet another blow to modernist painting’s tumultuous legacy.
In dialogue with Singh’s denim canvases are his more recently developed captcha series. Captchas, conventionally defined, are a type of challenge-response test used in computing to ensure that the response is generated by a person. It is a litmus test for subjectivity.
