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Cannibal Flower featuring Cate Rangel review
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Floor shot of random people dancing. or just moving really, fast
This past Cannibal Flower show was held at New Puppy LA. New Puppy is located off of Elm and Cypress; around where the 5 and the 110 meet. In artistic terms this is basically the middle of nowhere, which is a real shame because the venue is really great. It's like a cross between a big studio, a warehouse, and some hippie's loft. The bathrooms in particular are very interesting and worth the price of admission by themselves. It is said that you can judge a restaurant by its bathrooms. This is probably not true of art galleries, but still it's a nice touch. The only negative was perhaps the lack of couches. Of course it is not common for galleries to have couches, but couches feel very appropriate for this place.
Michael Pukac painting
The artwork in the show, as is the case at a Cannibal Flower show, was numerous and varied. There were probably around 50-60 pieces in the show from a lot of different styles, but for the most part were some variation of "lowbrow" art or graffiti art. As can be expected with a show with this many artists, the quality was equally varied but there was a good handful of strong pieces. In particular a small piece by L Croskey titled "When I Grow Up I Want to be an Artist" was very clean as was a graffiti piece by Shirt King Phade "Peep da Technique." In the back patio there was live painting by Michael Pukac. Until recently I had never seen or heard of this guy, but now he's at nearly every show I go to now. This probably makes him one of the more prolific live painters in LA. The general atmosphere of the show was pretty laid back and friendly with a handful of cuties in the mix. It felt a lot of like a big dinner party for local artists. You know, minus the dinner.
"Li'lith" by Cate Rangel
The featured artist Cate Rangel was represented by about 6 roughly two foot acrylic portraits of girls in a sort of gothic/illustrative style. Her work showed pretty good technique with some nice choices in composition. The composition of her figures felt very photographic, which I personally prefer over more traditional painterly poses if for no other reason than it being less played out. In general though, her work is merely just above average. The exception to this being the piece "Li'lith" which really stood out. It has a really cinematic quality to it and the juxtaposition of the black dress and the crisp shading on her face with the desaturated background was very well executed. I believe it was painted on a board of some kind (masonite maybe?) which was a great move, because it gave the piece a real oil painting look to it (much more so than her canvas pieces.) If she had slapped on a coat of liquin on it she could probably fool a lot of people.
Her previous work that I had seen on her website had a different compositional style. It had a very Alex Gross/ surrealistic baseball card look to it. I'm not sure of the time-line of the pieces in this show, but if these pieces are her newest work it is definitely a step in the right direction and shows a lot of promise.
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