Kaden Van De Loo’s ‘Hurry-Up Offense’

At his exhibition at Portrait Society, painter Kaden Van De Loo dares to withhold color from his canvases.

by

Visual Arts

If formal painting is a tough sell to the uninitiated art spectator, then intuitive, monochromatic, formal painting is like trying to sell day-old sushi at a children’s birthday party. Given its almost parodic level of art historical specificity, it might surprise many to learn that monochromatic painting has a long, juicy history. From Kazimir Malevich to Yves Klein to Ellsworth Kelly to Olivier Mosset, generations of artists have found creative freedom within the chromatic and imagistic constraint of a single flat color.

Still, if you don’t geek out on this stuff, the very idea of a reductive one-color painting probably sounds limiting. But experience is contextual. If a housefly landed on a Hieronymus Bosch, you probably wouldn’t notice. If it landed on a Robert Ryman, it could change the entire experience. It’s all relative; equivalent universes of wonder and expression can thrive within any set of parameters. The artist’s role, then, is to establish those brackets—and keep the universe buzzing inside them.

Painter Kaden Van De Loo’s exhibition “Hurry Up Offense” at Portrait Society (through Aug. 29) dares to squeeze and withhold, while most artists his age—he’s 24—might prefer to expound and emote. The restraint is immediately refreshing. Memoir, a 6-by-5-foot iridescent purple canvas on the gallery’s inside wall dazzles with a mid-century touch. Its dappled surface interrupted only by a few spots of analogous color recalls a time when brushwork and paint handling were ends in themselves, rather than responsibilities en route to digital receptions. But don’t call it a throwback—it’s iridescent, after all—and in conversation with a dozen other minimalist triumphs in the show that look their age.

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Licks and Loops

Not all Van De Loo’s work is purely monochromatic; there are moments of rudimentary subject matter: licks and loops and lozenges of well-placed color. Dialing down the contrast on his imagery gives him space to pull off subtle moments of understated ecstasy. Take Match, for instance—a 6-by-7-foot canvas featuring a slapdashy green-black brick floating atop a soft, throbbing red expanse, while dioxazine purple dimples radiate outward. In the pared-down context of the show, the painting feels downright orgiastic. The colors land barely shy of a tonic note—just off, but just right. Jazz. Juicy and luscious, with a gooey, brushstroked surface you almost want to lick.

Around the corner, a slightly smaller painting titled Sentinel trades the silkiness of Match for a washy atmosphere of light, slightly slatey green. It’s drier and thinner, with alluvial traces like washout beds in thirsty soil. All the better to stage a delicate dance between a handful of lively ochre and scarlet marks.

Describing the work in the show at this level of specificity only makes sense because of the context Van De Loo has created. The same marks or colors wouldn’t deserve a second glance in a Robert Nava painting. But that’s the beauty of context—it carves an impossibly complex world into bite-sized vignettes to help us locate greater meaning.

It all reminds me of the famous scene from the mockumentary This is Spinal Tap when Chris Guest’s and Rob Riener’s characters are talking about the potential of a certain amplifier.

Nigel Tufnel: Eleven. Exactly. One louder.

Marty DiBergi: Why don’t you just make ten louder and make ten be the top number and make that a little louder?

Nigel Tufnel: [pause] These go to eleven.

Kaden Van De Loo is the bizarro, alternative-universe Nigel Tufnel—he goes down to one just to push it over the cliff… to two. Boom! Watching him move from three through 11 should be a blast.