La Luz de Jesus Presents David Sandlin

David Sandlin

January 4 - January 27, 2008

David Sandlin

"Swamp Preacher"

In 2006, Sandlin had his first major show, a mini-retrospective, in his native Ireland, at the Butler Gallery in Kilkenny. Major works from that show as well as several new large paintings and two books come to Los Angeles in January, showing at Billy Shire Fine Arts, and La Luz de Jesus Gallery.

At Billy Shire Fine Arts, Sandlin presents “Wonderfool World.” Sandlin has completed a series of giant-size paintings; several seven by twelve feet which compose the core of the series. Working in what critic Nancy Princenthal calls “the cartoony style he has perfected over the past 20 years, something of a cross between Thomas Hart Benton and Mad Magazine…” Wonderfool World, (2006, soft cover, 189 pages, published by Butler Gallery, ISBN ISBN-10: 0954863526) in its turn, is part of A Sinner’s Progress, an epic cycle of paintings, artist’s books, prints, and installations that has consumed Sandlin’s attention for a decade.

Sandlin’s series of paintings updates the 19th-century Romantic painter Thomas Cole’s “Voyage of Life,” creating a postmodern morality tale “bursting at the seams with drama and allegory, visual detail, and theatrical elaboration” (Princenthal). A close look reveals that Sandlin also draws inspiration from works of the 17th and 18th centuries such as John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress and William Hogarth’s Rake’s Progress. “But it’s actually all about me, my family, and the predicaments of postmodern life—the joys and sorrows that are everybody’s lot, and the overload of cultural baggage we all pass on from generation to generation,” says Sandlin.

Additionally, in the Billy Shire Fine Arts project room; Sandlin presents the drawings he made for An Alphabetical Ballad of Carnality (2006, hardcover, 32 pages, published by Blab/Fantagraphics, ISBN 10: 1560977310), and volume VI of his seven-volume series of books. Steven Heller, in the New York Times, called the book a “comically grotesque series of disturbingly funny tableaus about the upside of eternal damnation, filthy lucre, and masochistic mendacity.”

At La Luz de Jesus Gallery, Sandlin presents the "Swamp Preacher" exhibition in the form of four oil on panel pieces and approximately 40 original black/white and color drawings from the 2006 Fantagraphics comic of the same name. Swamp Preacher is Sandlin's first classic-format comic book, a loving homage to the EC and Marvel comics he grew up with in Ireland. Drawn in the tradition of the classic pulp comic "origin" tales of super heroes and villains, Swamp Preacher tells the surreal back story of Carl Bob deVille, an enigmatic, morally ambiguous character in Sandlin's sprawling epic series A Sinner's Progress (this is volume 6). Picking up the tale of Carl Bob's life where his confessional Alphabetical Ballad of Carnality leaves off, Swamp Preacher is a twisted bildungsroman related by the ultimate unreliable narrator.