Christopher Cascio and Russell Etchen at Bill Arning Exhibitions
+4 Christopher Cascio and Russell Etchen at Bill Arning Exhibitions
Christopher Cascio and Russell Etchen at Bill Arning Exhibitions
Christopher Cascio and Russell Etchen at Bill Arning Exhibitions
Christopher Cascio and Russell Etchen at Bill Arning Exhibitions
Christopher Cascio and Russell Etchen at Bill Arning Exhibitions
Christopher Cascio and Russell Etchen at Bill Arning Exhibitions
Christopher Cascio and Russell Etchen at Bill Arning Exhibitions
To entice you to his gallery exhibition, Bill Arning described Christopher Cascio’s painting “Untitled” (Pink Stairs) from the Portal series as a “hypnotic eye-licking pleasure bomb.” To this I would add “acid trip.”
Arning enticed me. Bill Arning Exhibitions has a two-artist show: Christopher Cascio “Portals, Pinwheels and Process Paintings 2020-2021” and Russell Etchen “About Six Thousand Five Hundred Rocks, About One Thousand Five Hundred People, and Some Clover,” through August 22, 2021. Refreshingly, the art seems to be solely for the purpose of viewer pleasure, no political squawking, no lofty art terms, nor tedious curatorial descriptions of materials and processes, no gaseous art-critical chatter.
Christopher Cascio created lusciously colored geometric abstraction with aerosol acrylic. According to Arning, Cascio’s art is inspired by color theory and motifs based on traditional quilting patterns. I say Cascio is a superb colorist, and arguably anal.
Russell Etchen made cartoony drawings of repetitive patterns of faces and rocks with eyes, on paper and in wall mural format. Etchen delightfully gooses the viewer with repetition and monotony. Arning said Etchen’s drawings and painting installations and books originate in Zine culture, cartooning, graffito and rock and roll aesthetics. And come out of Etchen’s philosophical meditations on similarity, difference, repetition and reproduction. Raised in Houston, the artist lives in Los Angeles.
