For one night only, CONDUIT 742 presents its Inaugural Exhibition “James Valentine: Paintings”
CONDUIT 742—a pop-up space dedicated to exhibiting art by artists—presents its inaugural exhibition, “James Valentine: Paintings”, a retrospective of works by Los Angeles artist James Valentine. The show spans four decades of painting—much of it never before publicly exhibited. Located at 742 N. Cahuenga Blvd., Los Angeles, CA 90038, CONDUIT 742 will host an opening reception on Saturday, July 19, 5:00-9:00pm with the artist in attendance. This special exhibition is open to the public for one night only. An Illustrated catalog/zine with an essay by artist, curator, and writer Doug Harvey, will be available during the reception. For more information about “James Valentine: Paintings”, please visit: dghrvy.wixsite.com/conduit742. Future viewings will be arranged by appointment. To schedule a visit, please email: conduit742@gmail.com.
Each group of works in this Valentine survey conjures the artist’s impressions of a particular cultural moment in the imaginative history of Los Angeles, stretching from the artist’s days in the L.A. punk scene to his current suburban self-exile in Long Beach.
In addition to functioning as historical portals, Valentine’s paintings are a record of a deeply personal and idiosyncratic engagement with formal issues, materials, art history, and the crisis of representation that has driven modern art since the invention of photography. While frequently paying overt homage to painters like Van Gogh, El Greco, Francis Bacon, David Hockney, and Andy Warhol, Valentine also shows affinities with picture-makers as disparate as Peter Saul, Philip Guston, Paula Rego, and Georg Baselitz – all of whom (except those first two) struggled to make images of people, places, and things that had currency in a post-Pollock world.
Along the way, we are privileged to witness the progress of an isolated artist, grappling with and assimilating the formal and conceptual vocabulary of modern painting, with puns dumb enough to be John Baldessari’s and painterly passages as exquisite as an Impressionist master’s. In spite of this embedment in the language and history of Art, Valentine’s work retains a quietly insurgent outsider energy—a restless shifting of styles and strategies leading from his Balloonist portraits of the Germs, the Ramones, and Johnny Rotten, to the Zen-like clarity of his recent landscapes systematically depicting his Long Beach neighborhood.
