By David Pagel
Los Angeles Times

May 8, 2009

Chris Finley’s 12th solo show in Los Angeles
since 1993 is his smallest ever — only three
pieces. But they’re doozies.
At ACME Gallery, each packs worlds within
worlds, forming a quirky universe in which
perception and memory play off each other in
complex experiences that feed the imagination as
they are fueled by its enlivening energy.
The simplest is a nearly 5-by-8-foot painting of
swooping lines and spiraling curves that recalls
Duchamp’s stylized riffs on Picasso. Finley’s
sensual abstraction also refers to Russell Byars,
the world-record-holding stone skipper, and Gerd
Kanter, the Olympic gold medal winner in the
discus. It all makes visual, not rational, sense.
“Teased as Children” and “The Shadow Man” require viewer participation. Both
are Rube Goldberg-style devices that involve pulleys, Russian Constructivism,
New Age spirit-catchers and a sense of adventure.
The first features a wall-mounted, horizontally oriented, Brancusi-style totem
pole, a magnifying glass, a hefty, hand-carved fishing lure and a radically
excerpted version of Greater L.A.’s phone book. The second includes a large
metal lid that covers a suite of nutty pencil drawings, whittled golf tees, a holepunched
novel, a rubber ball, a heavy chain, a picnic blanket and several delicate
sculptures made of balsa, string and paint, not to mention a generous dose of
hokey ingenuity.
Finley’s terrifically idiosyncratic art is so far out of step with what is hip and trendy
that it makes you think he might be out of his mind. But it’s also so inventive,
unpretentious and engaging that you’d be nuts not to take it seriously. A 15-year
survey of the 37-year-old’s art would open some eyes and blow some minds.

Barack Obama, Hilary Clinton, and Karl Rove - these are just a few of the political
figures who serve as the subjects of Chris Finley’s portrait series, “Power Sources.” But
we can’t locate them anywhere on the canvases. We can’t apprehend them. Where
exactly are they? We can ask this of the paintings, but also of the figures themselves.
Politicians may be highly visible and seem to be everywhere all at once - on television,
online, in newspapers, and magazines - and yet they are far removed from us. The person
who shook Obama’s hand at a campaign rally will probably never be that physically close
to the man ever again, and how many of us are ever even in that proximity? People in
power daily affect our lives and fortunes, and more recently our misfortunes, but their
distance I parallel in a sense to their “reach.” The fact that in Finley’s abstract paintings
these figures have completely disappeared relates to their absence/presence in our lives,
to their visibility and invisibility. The forever expanding information/image world of
today allow them to be everywhere and nowhere all at once. To render them
unrecognizable is, in fact, as much a deliberate act of abstraction as of representation, a
merging of the two, and maybe the most accurate way - the only way? - to represent
them. The Resigned (2008) is a veritable rogue’s gallery of Bush administration officials
who were forced to leave office - including John Ashcroft; the former attorney general
and staunch supporter of the Patriot Act; John Bolton, the most contentious American
ambassador ever appointed to the United Nations; Donald Rumsfeld, who served (or did
a disservice to the military) as secretary of defense; and George Tenet, who stepped down
as CIA director after his insistence that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction was
revealed as pure deception. With this group portrait of Finley’s, “abstraction” is turned
into a form of mirroring, albeit one that has more in common with the funhouse mirror
than with everyday reflections, and which suggests as well that those who traffic in
distortion can only be represented in kind.
Like many artists working today, particularly those who push recognizable imagery
through abstract filters - as Alex Brown does so deftly - Finley searches for and chooses
images from the Internet and then subjects them to various alterations. The images are
turned, stretched, and distorted, rendered completely alien tot heir original sources. One
is reminded of Cubist/Futurist/Constructivist portraits and representations, from the
kineticism of Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase or George Grosz’s Republican
Automoatons, to Naum Gabo’s spatial dislocations. Finley also makes sculpture, and his
thinking in three dimensions, along with his affinity with the Futurists’ attempt to
represent the flow and disorientation of movement, allows his two-dimensional work to
take on the animation of objects is space and to address the instability of vision. His
double portrait McCain-Obama (2008) is an image of how almost inextricably tangled up
two political rivals can be. There is also a sense of humor in Finley’s work, and it’s not so
difficult to see his portraits as the ultimate caricatures - like the exaggerated celebrity
portraits that hang on the walls of the New York restaurant Sardi’s - of people who, by
way of their physical “defects,” are immediately familiar to us and just as recognizable as
if we were confronted with a photograph. With the “bad guys,” Finley’s abstract
caricatures can be seen to amplify each person’s moral defects, presenting us not with
figurative but with disfigurative representations. His portrait o former New York City
mayor Rudolph Giuliani, Giuliani (2008), with its tangle of forms and lines, is an
accurate rendering of this grotesque simulacrum - of his twisted appropriation of the
wreckage of 9/11, and of his failed, deluded ambitions for the highest office in the
country. Only abstraction allows for this kind of verity. the Futurists certainly could not
have imagined the “speed of life” we are confronted with in the world of today. The sheer
velocity of images, and deception, that is translated/transformed in painting - possibly the
slowest, most obsolete carrier of information available to us - is testament to both the
persistence of abstraction and to our need to make sense of who and where we are. If
“distance equals control,” abstractions, which allows for a distancing effect, has become
a means of getting uncomfortably closer to truths we’d prefer to avoid. Just as the
Dadaists critiqued the media in their time, Finley’s elegant, absurdist portraits have
something to say about ours.