Michael Mancari, Skate Park, 2016, oil and enamel on canvas, 60″ x 77″
REVIEW
ON VIEW: Forays into Abstract Painting
Three Los Angeles Exhibitions
By Molly Enholm
March 10, 2017
Michael Mancari, “Motherboard”
at CB1 Gallery
Through April 9, 2017
To view the paintings of Michael Mancari is to excavate through an encyclopedic layering of painting techniques and fractured iconography. An architectonic layering of sprayed graffiti, Twombly-esque scrawls, mechanical stencils, and impasto paint strokes overlay and obscure hints of the human form, landscape motifs and blurred urban settings. Although nearly completely abstract, the Michigan-born, Yale-graduate and recent Los Angeles-transplant confirms the traditional notion of the “painted picture plane as window into another world” in his first solo exhibition. The thick swaths of paint appear to hover in front of blurred imagery that equally recedes into the distance. Intriguing and elusive, the paintings both engage and frustrate any attempt to navigate into these surreal visions.