Louis Cameron at I-20

Louis Cameron stole the pithy title of his recent solo show from the supermarket shelves. "Pop Secret" (the exhibition, not the popcorn) cleverly acknowledged the readymade sources of all the work on display, as well as Cameron's tendency to transform emblems of consumer culture into enigmatic visual riddles. Fourteen works in various mediums sat quite comfortably beneath this rubric, each straddling the realms of commercial advertising and formalist abstraction.

For the past couple of years, Cameron has made paintings from store-bought jigsaw puzzles, completely covering the loose pieces in spray enamels. His colors derive from everyday commercial products and are deployed in proportion to their presence on a given brand's label. When the painted puzzles are assembled and glued to wood panels, the compositions are unpredictably abstract, while the palettes remain surprisingly familiar. The examples in this show continue to underscore the insidious efficacy of corporate branding while also looking quite beautiful, especially when they include metallic pigments. In Newport (2003), for example, the mentholated blues and greens that dominate a vertical rectangle recall packs of the titular cigarettes. This particular brand also generates a few gold puzzle pieces, which are scattered throughout this mostly matte painting like shining stars.

Four of the newest works distill the colors of consumer culture in a different manner. Each consists of several square or circular canvases painted as vivid monochromes and arranged in rows or grids on the walls. What appear to be arbitrary choices of hue and composition are in fact rather literal enlargements of the Pantone color swatches that determine a given product's chromatic identity. Typically printed as tiny squares or circles on inconspicuous box flaps, the swatches are here blown up to the size of easel paintings. While the obscure sources for this series may remain a mystery to most viewers, the one red and two blue circles that constitute Crest (2004) nonetheless invoke both Ellsworth Kelly and a popular brand of toothpaste.

Commercially printed ready-mades are also the basis for a mesmerizing video called Universal (2004-05). For this project, Cameron collected bar codes from various product packages littering his loft and scanned them into a seamless, 20-minute loop. Projected against a white wall, dozens of black vertical stripes slowly pulsate, growing thicker or thinner at irregular intervals. Like an early Bridget Riley painting summoned to life, Universal generates more and more perplexing optical illusions the longer one watches it. Are the black bars solid figures on a white ground, perhaps signifying eur collective imprisonment in a world of trademarks and codified consumption? Or are the white interstices, in fact, the solids, offering a more benign image of louvered blinds swaying against a darkened window?

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