Like latter-day Andy Warhols, they're messing with the sanctity of fine art -- and that's always good. By giving it away on the street, they're thumbing their noses at the idea of art as commodity. At the same time, like Warhol, they're capitalizing on it.
Los Angeles is a hotbed of urban art. The best work in "Electric Wasteland" is that of the Date Farmers, the duo Armando Lerma and Carlos Ramirez . Their aesthetic embraces Mexican murals, prison tattoos, and Catholic iconography. They paint on found boards and corrugated steel. Curator Leonie Bradbury has conjoined six of their pieces in one pulsing assemblage that has the vitality of a city wall covered in posters.
"Loco Snake" hangs right beside "Puto Scorpion, " each showing a dark-eyed man whose broad-shouldered body has become a canvas for a tattoo. The figures, drawn with delicate cross-hatching, look like tattoos and loom darkly over colorful backgrounds. These works brood, challenge, and offer no easy explanations.
The punchy comic-book styles of Aaron White and Dave Kinsey , in contrast, serve up too much shallow angst and sentimentality. White, a commercial animator, makes gorgeous paintings; his backgrounds are interestingly layered and textured. But the boldly drawn characters he paints over them -- as in "Un Reve S'Echappe," in which a green androgynous figure swoops in, gripping a cross-eyed cassette player -- all convey a sappy adolescent woundedness.
Kinsey specializes in giant, muscular, empty-eyed men. In his black-and-white wall painting "The Prospects of Despair," several of them huddle together to one side as a large hand reaches toward the stems of cut flowers across the wall. It's an overblown emblem of broken manhood striving for salvation. Kinsey's style is vivid and assured, but his men are trite and wasted; they have nothing of the intrigue of the Date Farmers's men.
