Tom LaDuke. French Cemetery, 2015; acrylic and glitter on canvas over panel; 41 x 71 ½ x in. Courtesy of the Artist and Kohn Gallery, Los Angeles.

Each work in the show begins with an airbrushed rendering of a painting by an Old Master—Vermeer, Bosch, Velásquez, etc—although you wouldn’t know this by looking at them, and you don’t need to know it to “get” them. On top of this background, LaDuke layers a hodgepodge of images and marks, many autobiographical, although here too the provenance is less important than the effect. Realistically painted disco balls, candles, kitschy animals, and candy-colored geometric shapes float alongside smears, drips, blobs, and crudely rendered abstract forms. The most successful paintings are the larger ones (some over ten feet long), where the breadth of visual and tactile variation can spread out. LaDuke creates a shallow pictorial depth, as all of these elements press up against or sit atop the picture plane, threatening to tumble into real space. It makes sense that one of his source images is Manet’s Dead Toreador (1864), whose titular subject similarly seems to emerge from the canvas, jutting toward the viewer. Polyrhythmic Looping (2014) provides one of the only indications of depth behind the canvas, as a trompe l’oeil fissure, reminiscent of the fake tear in Duchamp’s Tu m’ (1918), reveals painterly swirls beneath the serene, airbrushed surface.

Tom LaDuke. Polyrhythmic Looping, 2014; acrylic and glitter on canvas over panel; 53 x 95 x 2 in. Courtesy of the Artist and Kohn Gallery, Los Angeles.

In contrast to his art-historical background visuals, LaDuke also pulls from a grab bag of contemporary and personal imagery. In the provocatively titled Gloryhole (2015), Day-Glo TIE fighters from Star Wars zoom out from an orange-ringed portal. Instead of resembling their cinematic sources, however, the spaceships are based on vector graphics from the first Star Wars video game, presumably recalling LaDuke’s own childhood experience from the 1970s. There are other glimpses of personal nostalgia: a cookie jar, kids’ toys, a Christmas elf. In French Cemetery (2015), streaks of paint define the outlines of a car, maybe a Cadillac or a Lincoln. In Lap, Trickle, Lap (2015), a monster-like figure composed of paint smears and glitter stands at the center, a viscous golem willed into existence by youthful enthusiasm. Similar to a child’s early artistic efforts, it captures the moment when just pushing paint around coalesces into form. In a couple of works, the artist’s head appears as an ethereal, neon apparition, a ghostly witness to the fantastical visual tableaux.

Tom LaDuke. Gloryhole, 2015; acrylic and glitter on canvas over panel; 50 x 42 in. Courtesy of the Artist and Kohn Gallery, Los Angeles.

As the title of the show, Candles and Lasers, implies, LaDuke has an interest in different forms of light, from Renaissance flickers to sci-fi beams. Candles, mirror balls, rainbows; hazy, glowing spots; and thin colored lines that could be read as lasers all make appearances. The glitter contrasts with these faux illuminations as the only literal source of light (via reflection). Historically, candles in paintings serve as memento mori, reminders of the fleeting nature of existence. LaDuke updates this classic symbol with more contemporary stand-ins for mortality—the flash of a laser or the glimmer of the dance floor.

Tom LaDuke. Lap, Trickle, Lap, 2015; acrylic and glitter on canvas over panel; 68 x 110 in. Courtesy of the Artist and Kohn Gallery, Los Angeles.

Packed with imagery and abstraction, precision and coarseness, memories, history, and fantasies, LaDuke’s paintings are willfully awkward, fragmented almost to the point of indecipherability. They share something of the internet’s democratization of imagery, but here the aesthetic is less chat room and more wood-paneled rec room. They border on bad taste but they’re good fun. The joy in contemplating these weird and wonderful works comes from trying to figure out what we’re looking at, even if we never find out.

Tom LaDuke: Candles and Lasers is on view at Kohn Gallery in Los Angeles through May 20, 2015. 

Tom LaDuke, Run Generator, 2009. Graphite, glue, mirror, 6 x 19 x 9 1/2 inches

On Saturday, April 13, 2013, ten artists representing a range of painterly approaches and hailing from Los Angeles, New York, and the Bay Area gathered in San Francisco to take the pulse of a practice that is denigrated as often as it is celebrated. Linda Geary and James Gobel (the chair and associate chair, respectively, of California College of the Arts’ painting program) organized the symposium, which was attended by a large, enthusiastic audience, and introduced it with the stated intention to address issues of practice and theory as well as matters of material, form, and context that seem urgent in contemporary painting. They addressed neither the specter of Rosalind Krauss invoked by the title of the day’s proceedings nor the legitimation of painting after the advent of conceptualism, paving the way instead for an exemplary range of perspectives linking painting to both life and art. The subsequent ten-minute presentations by each of the invited artists set the stage for two roundtable discussions in which shared concerns and interests quickly coalesced.

Any unease caused by the prospect of one hundred minutes of painterly presentation was instantly dispelled by the Los Angeles–based practitioner Tom LaDuke’s high-octane, confessional exposé of the “humiliation” of painterly practice. With deadpan drollery, LaDuke raced through a gamut of concerns, from abject life to brutish death, presenting images of paintings that veered from the photorealistic to the abstract and of extraordinarily painstaking, lifelike sculptures. He candidly voiced the angst of striving to sustain a hermetic studio-based existence, of imbuing painting with conceptual and metaphysical validity, of being stuck with oneself and one’s compulsive behaviors, and of constantly seeking the means to short-circuiting one’s predilections in pursuit of an innovative artistic practice that retains urgency for both practitioner and viewer. In situating the development of his art directly alongside his life experiences, and in expressing doubt and desperation, LaDuke placed painting firmly at the center of a sentient artistic practice. In a way, he said it all.

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