Whitehot Magazine

David Lloyd: Dreaming with Androids of Electric Sheep

The Search, 2024, AI-generated imagery, acrylic, oil, and ink on wood, 42x40 inches

 

In the Beginning: New Paintings by David Lloyd
September 6 to October 18, 2024
SPY Projects
3709 W. Jefferson Blvd.
Los Angeles, CA, 90016
 

By GARY BREWER September 25, 2024

“In the gardens of memory, in the palace of dreams, that is where you and I will meet.”

Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass

Painting is a malleable medium—both materially, in its endless formal possibilities, and poetically, in the effect it can have on human consciousness. It stirs emotions, engages the imagination, illuminates the intellect and touches one’s soul. Its fluidity evokes philosophical metaphors of the strange uncertain nature of reality, the slipstream metamorphosis of existence from one state of being to another.

David Lloyd is an artist who has explored the infinite formal and psychological possibilities of painting. For many years he has created a hybridized form of painting that synthesizes the rich history of abstraction. He blends geometric abstraction, color field painting, abstract expressionism, trompe l’oeil passages, shaped canvases and even pop elements in beautiful, humorous and complexly engaging paintings. The depth of his eccentric intuition allows him to move freely through these myriad styles. His ability to bring all of these elements together into powerful, deeply resolved paintings is an act of magic.

In Lloyd’s work there is a mixture of seriousness and irreverence, humor and pathos. One feels his thoughts morphing in the act of painting. A drip instigates a form; a thick impasto passage turns into a floating bit of detritus freed from the surface by an airbrushed shadow. Flat frontal geometric forms are coaxed into spatial constructs following eccentrically tweaked rules of perspective. His paintings are an existential search for a form of freedom to act without limits, to push the boundaries of the medium and end up on the other side of the looking glass.

Trip Sitter, AI-generated imagery, acrylic, oil, ink and nail polish on wood, 34x30 inches

Recently he has added the use of AI to his creative process. He feeds into the system his work—an archive of 40 years of paintings, drawings and ceramic sculptures—as source data for the AI system, which then churns out iterations and adaptations of his work. From these he finds passages that ignite his imagination. He takes the parts he likes, prints them, affixes them to the surface of his shaped panels, and responds intuitively, adding his stylistic flourishes, forms, shapes and physically dense passages of paint to arrive at new hybridizations—what Lloyd jokingly called “David Lloyd 2.0.”

The results of this new “medium” are an accelerated form of stylistic variations of his ideas, morphed and blended with the vast storage of images on the internet.

He said of the experience of working with AI, “It is hard not to anthropomorphize my interaction with AI. It is, in a sense, like having a studio assistant. I do a drawing quickly and photograph it and load it into the system. It quickly produces variations in which I see some element of my drawing but with the AI’s effort to make sense of it, adding things from its vast source of images. There is a problem with AI—it has hallucinations, inventing things that don’t exist, that tech people are trying to fix. I encourage it; I want the strangest and weirdest results. I push it and pull it back, constantly returning it to my original source material. If it goes far enough it starts to pull more information from the infinite image bank of the internet and tries to normalize my forms, to find a known world for them to fit in, so I keep adding my images to confuse it and arrive at strange and unexpected worlds.” Lloyd is searching for what he has always pursued: the strange mashups that create uncanny and playful formal inventions that touch one physically in psychologically engaging ways. He once said, “An artist like Frank Stella creates work that engages one from the neck up; my paintings affect one from the neck down.”

In his solo exhibition In the Beginning: New Paintings by David Lloyd, at SPY Projects in Los Angeles, the artist’s new work pulsates with energy. These are eye-catching, muscular paintings whose color chords oscillate between sublime luminosity and the high-key palette of pop culture. Lloyd creates passages generated by AI that are printed on paper, then glues them to the shaped panels. These elements segue seamlessly into his masterful paintings; it is often hard to tell if it is printed or a painted passage.

The painting “A Protean World” (2024), is dominated by a plastic-looking pink form that gives the illusion of a physical object bulging out from the surface and into our space. It is a print generated by AI that suggests a highly refined manufactured object—a part from a car, maybe a shiny pink bumper, or a product whose purpose is non-specific but that glistens with the luster of desire that products are meant to evoke. It pulls outward into space while much of the painting that surrounds it revels in painterly surface details. Abstract passages are veiled under washes of beige. A small turquoise shelf seems to hold a white form whose airbrushed shadow allows it to float. Drips flow down from the bottom edge of the form, anchoring it as both image and matter. Improvised passages of lush, loose colors burst forth like epiphanies. A flame-like design that recalls hot-rod car culture animates a hard-edged green shape. The rhythmic cadence of Lloyd’s internal relationships and his exquisite sensitivity as a colorist creates a deeply satisfying unity. Even the shape of the outer edge of his paintings seems to be the logical outcome of these internal dynamics. The dialogue between the highly artificial look of the printed AI image and the organic handmade painterly surfaces suggests a poetic metaphor of human and technological forces engaged in a symbiotic relationship.

A Protean World, 2024, AI-generated imagery, acrylic, fabric, and airbrush on wood, 74x75 inches

Lloyd spoke about the subjective aspect of choice, the images generated by AI serving as prompts he uses to leap into new worlds. “I have made thousands of AI-generated images. From those I have only made 25 paintings. The images that it generates are templates. I do not work like a photorealist making exacting copies of what comes out of the systems, but use it as a starting point for my deeply intuitive process as a painter. I add and subtract as I go along, I might start somewhere and have a shaped piece that I will then add a whole new shaped section to; it is still a deeply subjective painterly process but with this new element that is churning out variations of me. These systems adapt and change as they begin to know what you like. It is a strange and fascinating experience to think about the future and how we will work together with artificial intelligence in unimaginable ways.”

“The Search” (2024), is a beautiful painting, sculptural in its illusionist lushness. An AI-generated form, again suggesting something from automobile design, curves and bends in sexy, fluid sensuousness. The colors transition from a muted dusty gray-beige with turquoise and purple shadows to white highlights that give it the feel of a shiny, hyper-smooth, polished surface. It is the shine of some manmade concept of rarefied perfection. Framed in this form is a dance of abstract shapes in olive greens, pinks and lavender on a field of stains and drips. Another passage, a painting within a painting, is a pink rectangle where a bold gestural brushstroke of wet-into-wet deep maroon conveys the calligraphic gestural energy of an Ab Ex painter. Lloyd’s painted passages knock the hyper-perfection of the refined object off its pedestal, with a messy, sloppy handmade quality expressing an “I am sorry I spilled fruit juice on your brand-new car seat”; they insert the body into the artifice that AI has crafted. It is this playful tension between the real world we live in and these expressions from a system that has no body, that injects a strange new pathos into these works.

David Lloyd, in his search for new ways of thinking and seeing, is dreaming with androids of electric sheep. He is entering this new world with equal parts humor and wonder at where this new path will lead, creating beautiful worlds to fill this landscape unfolding before us.

On view through October 18, 2024. WM

Gary Brewer

Gary Brewer is a painter, writer and curator working in Los Angeles. His articles have appeared in Hyperallergic, Art and Cake, and ART NOWLA.

Email: garywinstonbrewer@gmail.com 

 

Website: http://www.garybrewerart.com

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