Weekend

‘When I think of the Los Angeles-based artist Tomory Dodge’, writes Lauren O’Neill-Butler, ‘a specific painting comes to mind: Weekend, 2005’. Featured in the artist’s first solo show at CRG in New York in 2006, this is a large and virtuosic example of his painterly engagement with themes of disaster, detritus and debris. Titled after Jean-Luc Godard’s 1967 film, which follows a bourgeois couple through a series of violent and disturbing incidents, the canvas depicts the red drum kit that is played in one of the final scenes to accompany the horrific slaughter of a pig. A pulsating forest of frenetic painterly streaks evokes something of this primordial rhythm, littering the floor and canopy like discarded remains. For Dodge, scenes of apocalypse and chaos offer the perfect springboard for hisattempts to rehabilitate the primal power of pigment. As Jeffrey Ryan writes, ‘His works all try to help make sense of that perennially slow magic which is painting … that alchemy that can create images that we understand but never fully capture.’