"Slightly All the Time” by Mike Stilkey at Kinsey/Desforges

LOS ANGELES

According to Art ltd Magazine...

There is something about California artist Mike Stilkey’s way of articulating an image that seems to speak with an Eastern European accent. From his moody atmospheric gestures, to the elaborate armatures and sweeping architectures that support more ambitious pictures, Stilkey renders with a figurative mannerism that flirts with caricature, and has a taste for an almost oppressive black, white and red palette. Even the penmanship of his text elements sings with a frenetic vibration. The overall sense of romance, danger and decadence is reminiscent in fact of comments the Czech author Milan Kundera made in referencing the Eastern European aesthetic as being a kind of “ecstatic baroque.” What makes Stilkey’s work charming and intriguing beyond the modern urban gothic feel, and what makes his literary style come full circle, is his use of books as not only the inspiration, but as real, physical elements of his compositions as collage and/or sculptural painted surfaces.

The ambitious installation “See What You Say” assembles more than 1000 books into a double wall, before transforming that wall with a mural. The books were also stacked on the floor in front of the main walls, the whole tied together with a painted base of a giant red triangle. A darkly beautiful woman with a cat and red lipstick, a pensive man with a typewriter, a vase of red flowers—each figure rendered on a separate spike of books with shadowy spaces in between them—could be a metaphor for the human condition or an homage to the alleys of a great spy movie. Freeing Miniature Horses from Chess Set (2008) and Bird Helps Man with Novel (2007) are two of the most successful paintings exemplifying his use of surreal, intellectual, heavy-handed metaphors and capricious, dancing line work to great emotional and narrative effect. What Romance Can Such a Life Have (2008) depicts a man on a bicycle, another man with a wine bottle at a desk, and other figures arrayed in discreet drawn frames. The paper is loaded with hand-copied text, framed to look like book pages with fragments of text such as “it was strange company and a wondrous voyage.” The parts are held not together but apart, by window frames, edges of pages, and the sweeping lines of pub bars or receding streets that act like walls. Always with Stilkey there is a boundary, a border, a making separate, a dare: something to get beyond. -Shana Nys Dambrot


“See What You Say,” 2008
Mike Silkey, acrylic on 1000+ vintage and discarded books
Photo: Dave Kinsey

http://www.mikestilkey.com/