Robert Minervini

"Regeneration" acrylic on canvas  46" x 50"  2010

"Reclamation Project"  Oil, acrylic and spray paint on canvas  46" x 50"  2010

"The Rising Tide"  acrylic, oil and spray paint on canvas  46" x 50"  2010

"LA (sell me something else)"  acrylic on canvas  50" x 68"  2009 

"Tomorrow Dreams"  acrylic on canvas  75" x 126"  2011  

Robert Minervini's sometimes cryptic paintings are a curious blend of old fashioned heroic landscape from the days of Bierstadt and Caspar David Friedrich, and a modern urban post-apocalyptic chic, complete with graffiti and graphic art influences. It sounds unlikely but you can see the results for yourself. Forlorn high-rises and super highway flyovers soar into the miasma of a palm tree swamp or above the creeping reclamation of invasive city plants. He combines textured rendering with flat stenciled shapes and a graphic feel, and ties it all together with sometimes unlikely but effective color palettes. All of this lends a surreal weight to a vision of the modern urban environment which is both bleak and pop at the same time. While painting is his primary medium, he also produces installations, sculpture and murals.

You can look through all of it on his website: robertminervini.com and keep track of latest news and other tidbits on his blog, robertminervini.blogspot.com

His work was published recently in New american Painting 91

Cindy Tower

"Passage", 2010  72 x 68 inches, oil on canvas

"Maintenance Walk", 60 x 60 inches, 2010 oil on canvas

"Seam", 2009  84 x 71 inches, oil on canvas

Tommy Knocker  2007   Oil on silk  68 x 43 inches
Painted in Federal Mill #3, Leadington, MO

Site Painting Photo by Malcolm Gay
Tower painting "Big Wheel" (above) inside a "borrowed" studio- (trespassing) in East Saint Louis

 Cindy Tower's large scale paintings of abandoned factories and similar sites, capture the romance of decay. Post-industrial America (and Europe, and Russia) has become a kind of 'pilgrimagic' destination for recorders of a lost civilization; like those 18th century artists painting the great monuments of antiquity rising from bases of rubble and dripping with vines. Only here the lost age is a much more recent past. And it's not as though the technology has vanished. Much of it has merely moved to developing countries where all the same stuff is still shiny and new. The scale and scope of the abandonment has captured the imagination of quite a few artists, especially photographers who share their documents on group sites like Flickr and LiveJournal. While photographers have the advantage of being able to get in and out of these sites relatively quickly (almost without exception such sites are legally off limits), Ms. Tower's work, done on location, intensifies the experience in a way that a photograph cannot. Her painting is a kind of post industrial impressionism. The chaos and the detritus are enhanced in loving layers of marks and colors allowing the more legally minded viewer to get a real visceral sense of what these locations are like, and more importantly, what they mean.

She does much more work than what I've shown here, including installations and landscape paintings, but her almost fussy brushwork lends itself exquisitely to this particular subject matter.
There is so much to look at on her website ( www.cindytower.com ) that you may want to bookmark it for a bit and go back several times to see it all.

I'd like to thank River Styx magazine for putting her work on the cover so I could find out about it.

EVOL/CT'INK

EVOL is the moniker of a German graffiti artist who turns random objects into buildings by using stencils and spray paint. He's perfected his technique to create extraordinary optical illusions. The first three pieces here are part of an ongoing series of broken down cardboard boxes transformed into urban tenements and street scenes. Some of these images are quite large and you'll really appreciate them better if you click on and view them full size. He also turns other objects into buildings; electrical junction boxes, parts of walls, a cassette tape, whatever. Anything vaguely rectangular really. You can see a few of his pieces at www.wilde-gallery.com but if you really want to spend time with this artist's work, you'll want to go to his Flickr page and look through his set labeled some of mine. There you can also find this time lapse video of his process.






















"Dieffenbach Str. Backyard" vers.#1 spraypaint and stencil on cardboard 110x98cm











"Lehmbruck" 9-11 spraypaint and stencil on board 54x117cm


















"Wallflower" vers.#1 Spaypaint stencil on cardboard 54x68cm























"PLATTENBAUTEN"
spraypaint and stencil on electrical cabinet, 96 x 78 x 32 cm

















Okay, so now that you kind of get the idea, try to wrap your mind around the following installation piece called "Caspar David Friedrich Stadt"; a recent effort in which he transforms the interior floor area of a slaughterhouse in Dresden. To quote the artist:

"Painted in a 10x8meter hole in the ground on the abandoned slaughterhouse area in Dresden,
probably the former foundation of a huge boiler plant to derive soap from rendered beef fat or other utilization of carcass. However, even 15 years after closing down, it still smells nauseating.

The main slaughterhouse complex was built 1906 by hans erlwein. Kurt Vonnegut's novel "Slaughterhouse Five" also takes place there. Caspar David Friedrich painted that area called Ostragehege in 1832, And my favorite footnote is that his father was a soap-boiler ..."