LOS ANGELES, CA.- The internet has rendered a miraculous similitude to all kinds of images. News pours over us, atrocities, memes, rest in peace posts, Father’s Day pictures (hi, dad!), infographics, food pics… And it all comes in like a soft wash, a gauzy nothing. If a feeling is managed at all, it lasts only a few seconds, then gets obliterated by excess.
The “fucks” in J. Otto Seibold’s paintings render a response to such overstimulation, grafting comments onto the barrage of posts. It’s explicit, not for what it says, but because the paintings are, themselves, a representation of time online seeping into the time offline: a rear-view image of the scroll. “I think I paint,” Seibold dm’d me, “to make the clock disappear…”
The works are, it follows, hyper-flat, full of 2D architectural renderings, blocks of landscape, broken geometries — all suspended in depthless plains. Populating the fields are untethered symbols: topiaries, trashed Warhols and pots of color, and dripping botanicals wrenched like wrought iron garden fences.
If Arshile Gorky, who often painted pastiches of his contemporary’s work, attempting to mix sincerity and artifice to find “truth in painting,” was creating a mirror for modernism, perhaps J. Otto is creating a mirror for whatever vague epochal word we’re in now.
Most of the paintings made in the last few months include stenciled vases, each colored-in with its own schema, many adorned with bannered text. Somehow, they feel a bit set off from the place-less time-less motifs I’ve described in the work. I called my dad to ask about them. He said, he painted the vases because they are fragile, but they hold life. There’s an optimism to their repeated inclusion that saves these works from the doom scroll with which they reckon. Cut flowers still holding form. - Theadora A Walsh
J. Otto Seibold (b. 1960) is a self-taught artist who was born in Oakland, California, and grew up an apricots-throw away from the John Muir home in Martinez, CA. He was able to sneak into the art world during the “outsider artist” craze of the 1990s and is the first person to use digital software to create children’s books with Mr. Lunch Takes a Plane Ride (1993). Seibold has continued publishing for the past twenty years and is best known for the Mr. Lunch series, as well as Olive the Other Reindeer (Chronicle Books, 1997), and Vunce Upon a Time (Chronicle Books, 2008).
Also a widely exhibited artist, he has shown work in galleries and museums including Deitch Projects, New York; Paule Anglim, San Francisco; Grass Hut, Portland, OR; MASS MoCA, Adams, MA; and Creative Time’s 42nd Street Art Project. In 2000, Seibold had a solo museum exhibition at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco.
Seibold’s bio on the dust jacket of Free Lunch, however, is perhaps simpler: J. Otto draws all the time. It’s his job. He is a professional.
