If you think great painters can’t also be really fun, you probably haven’t seen the work in Todd Bienvenu’s Endless Bummer exhibit at Harper’s Books in East Hampton. In his paintings, Bienvenu uses finely tuned painterly chops to portray scenes of sexy, hilarious, and often ridiculously stupid people hanging tough in the New York sun.
“In art school, I kinda thought I was supposed to be making serious ‘Art,’” Bienvenu tells Creators. “But after I learned how to make a competent painting, it was boring to just think about formal things without putting stuff that I was interested in in there. Why not have both? It’s fun to subvert themes from art history with a dick joke.”
Dick jokes and all, these paintings aren’t trite or ironic — there’s an earnest appreciation of his subject matter that the artist paints in Max Beckmann-esque expressionistic swaths. Sure, he’s painted a Home Alone tattoo onto a bare-chested muscle man. But he does it with the bright-eyed appreciation of someone who remembers being 10 years old in 1990.
Full article:
