From Vegas to Loeb:

Lee Klein speaks out of both sides of his mouth in one gasp from both coasts for a second time

by Lee Klein

...Then I talked to Ms. Clewell about Damian Loeb (Fischl's dealer Mary Boone's candidate for the next American painting superstar in the tradition of Hopper and Fischl). Which gives me ample, segue to begin talking once more about the once furtive art world prince now crowned. Damian 's work has taken many critics a long time to get but one after another they seem to be coming around. His current exhibition "Public Domain" seems to perfectly explain his previous opus. Wherein he takes photos form a variety of sources and places his singular or serial dramatic action within. He was in the beginning high on the side of derivative of the painting genre. However strong artist that he is he has outthought the typecasting critics and moved onto a recipe where the juxtapositions (despite the artificial ingredients) are distinctly his own. Here though he has dropped taking other's photos without getting permission and has moved onto movies scenes mostly without discernible characters. Loeb's great strength has to convince those of the now converted that his appropriation is altogether warranted. Or as he told artnet.com's Charlie Finch "How can you 'steal' any images in the prefabricated world we live in; it's like stealing the air we breathe."

Nevertheless the painter has grown tired of the lawsuits and moved onto the movies. This suite of paintings at best has the golden ambient light of Johannes Vermeer traveling through emotionally vacant scenes from movies like "Fight Club" and "Boogie Nights." This pulling out from his own narrative into the prefabricated narrative of someone else's prefabrication does not necessarily do this hot shot well. There are some beautiful moments in these work s but a cinematic take on cinema, well, come on Damian.

The piece taken from L.A Confidential is definitely the high point. In this canvas every thing from the exquisite French vanilla of the room to the woman in the black lingerie undressing is tres magnifique. Further, the elongated pictorailization which allows the work to go beyond the bedroom and into the medicinal white bathroom is exquisitely done (as are the light sources and the beautiful absence of presence as he glosses in high detail over the black matte picture frames and petits objets d'art). Most of the other scenes he has chosen do not offer such poetics in passing and thus remain exercises or merely emblematic of a conceit. I am sure Mr. Loeb has just taken us on a new course of study. This writer expects owing to prior example for him to return with a body of work completely fleshed out by the next exhibition. So that what seems like simple glossed over hyperrealism one year will be groundbreaking content the next.