Charlie White - Brief Article

Interview, March, 2001 by David Rimanelli

INTRODUCING THE GREAT NEW VISUAL ART WIT

Charlie White takes our culture's at times ludicrous yet irresistibly funny obsessions with alien invasions and urban apocalypse as a means of delving into the mundane surrealism of Los Angeles. As a graduate student at Pasadena Art Center, White made an initial splash with the porno pictorials Femalien and Demonatrix, which, in defiance of the boundaries between high art and the "lowest" pop culture, appeared respectively in the magazines Cheri and Penthouse Comix, issues that were later shown at the Andrea Rosen Gallery in New York. (The gallery also installed a vending machine for both shows at which visitors could purchase the magazines at the newsstand price.)

Since then White has created detailed, color-saturated, digital images of comic-book monsters intruding in typically L.A. locales. The arch weirdness of the landscapes and their human inhabitants rivals that of the sci-fi interlopers. Says White of his choice of setting: "Los Angeles is a place in which artifice exists in an incredibly high form. That level of artifice, of course, is global right now, but Los Angeles embraces it in a way that no other place does. It's also the home of all those ideals that torment everyone. For instance, the blondes in my newest series really embrace that level of refined perfection we all associate with L.A. From my standpoint, to approach L.A. is to approach America."

In this most recent work (including his Cocktail Pa rty, pictured above), which debuts at Andrea Rosen this month, and which is on view from March 3 to April 7, White has created a perhaps more empathic alien visitor, named Joshua, who circulates in various sexually provocative or purposively banal settings. In many ways, the character is the most human being pictured. "Joshua is really just the starting point for dealing with how people perceive themselves, and how they interact with others," says White. Other pictures feature suburban matrons at a tea party gingerly fingering amorphous, fleshy slabs or a guy reclining on a bed getting intimate with the same. White's brazen style excels in tapping perverse desires and paranoias. Don't miss it.

David Rimanelli is contributing editor at ArtForum.