In his new show, Todd Bienvenu takes FOMO and turns it into JOMO: the joy of missing out. Across a selection of pieces from 2022, Bienvenu depicts the happiness of being alone but not lonely through vignettes that see his subjects reveling in the pleasure of doing exactly what they want, outside of the social expectations of other people and their rules. The exhibition is a mix of expressive painting, collage, and sculpture, all rendered in technicolor excess—excluding a selection of bronze figurines that instead shock with their irreverent subject matter. Roughly divided into two rooms, the larger of the two is filled with large, expressive, and textured canvases while the smaller one features paper collages. The collage room is the less successful venture: the chunky paper fragments that make up Bienvenu’s images take on an arts-and-crafts quality that distract from the content of the image. Take, for example, Lawnmower (2022). In the piece, a man on a riding lawnmower surveys his estate as a group of people frolic in a pool in the background. There is a clear separation between the foregrounded man and the others in the pool, but the limited detail available to the medium Bienvenu has chosen here saps this image of the joyful quality for which he is supposedly aiming. Many of the scenes in the collages, such as Wipeout (2022), are also revisited in paintings in the next room, where the painterly qualities of Bienvenu’s work best captures the intricacy required to truly show the pleasure of stepping back from the hustle and bustle of society.
