ART

Damian Loeb

The clean cinematic vision and controlled grace of Damian Loeb's paintings convey an uneasy calm. Investigating the horror and science fiction film genres, his hyper-realistic paintings lull the viewer into a state of therapeutic contemplation on modern life. In his treatments of the human body, some canvases are cropped so that the head or upper part of the body is eerily absent. In others the subject is caught in blurred motion, creating a feeling of suspended animation. No matter the topic, Loeb invests his movie-derived imagery with the sanctity of religious iconography, achieving a quiet stillness that simultaneously reveals the frantic anxiety of our age. (NR)