In the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, David Bonetti writes that initially he thought Louis Cameron’s paintings were in league with the hard-edged geometric abstraction of Mondrian, Ellsworth Kelly, and Burgoyne Diller, but then realized his approach is more conceptual. “The works from his recent ‘Tiles’ series are composed of rectangles of double squares that remind you of the tiles of domino games. You can almost hear them clack as they are laid down in place. Cameron, who lives in New York, doesn’t appropriate his tiles from available sources in commerce or industry. He makes them by casting forms out of acrylic paint and letting them dry and harden. His reference to the everyday comes from other means. Each of his compositions is based on the color palette of the packaging of a commonly available product � Hershey’s chocolate bars, Marlboro cigarettes, Duracell batteries. Cameron scans the packaging and lets the computer analyze the amount of each color used. He then applies the tiles in his own patterns to canvas (which is then applied to panel) to create jazzy compositions that look strangely familiar. Maybe it’s my own autobiography as a chocolate lover speaking, but ‘Hershey’s’ originally tipped me off that the colors were derived from popular sources. (Others in this hard-smoking city might first get the ‘Marlboro’ composition first.)” Read more.
“Louis Cameron: Recent Painting, Collage, and Video,” Schmidt Contemporary Art (Note: gallery website does not include this exhibit yet), St. Louis. Through June 14.
