Fanchild (1)

By: Adam McGovern
April 18, 2011

HiLobrow.com has curated a collection of our favorite recent blog posts by comic-book scriptwriter and translator Adam McGovern. This is the first in a series of ten installments.

Would It Kill You?

Elevated Subway-550 — Click on image for larger version.

There’s something to be said for pictures without words, and yesterday I went to see the pure article in a show of paintings by Valeri Larko. I first saw her stuff when she was doing anti-monuments of industrial sites — refineries, weird domes and silos of sinister toxic purpose and strange, solitary beauty — that were like perverse Great Pyramids of our modern kingdom. Later she did closer-focus junkyard scenes which, zeroed in to the random patterns of neglect and the colorful processes of decay, looked like open-air versions of an incidental Pollack painting. Most recently she’s been pursuing a kind of concrete genre painting, venturing not far from her New York neighborhood to find austere corners and intricate panoramas — scrawled-on gray walls, the worlds under train-tracks — that other painters overlook. There’s a yummy squalor to a work like “Graffiti, Zerega Ave, Bronx,” its dayglo spraycan stains like sewage painted in cake-writer; a scene like “Elevated Subway, Long Island City” reconstitutes the abstract grids of a Fernand Leger in its clatter of competing girders, lampposts, track-slats and their shadows. These pictures bear glimpsing witness to the landscape everyone knows but speeds up to avoid noticing. You never see a human body or face in Larko’s lens, and there’s the off-canvas theme that the noxious nature of what’s being memorialized could be killing its messenger. Yet the implication of a human presence to understand and animate — maybe redeem? — what’s being seen is the main point. In that way these paintings are, in the most crucial sense, lifegiving, and everyone could stand to look.

Artist site: www.valerilarko.com
Current exhibition (through 6/21/09): www.hunterdonartmuseum.org

This post originally appeared at ComicCritique.BLOG, on April 6, 2009.

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Fanchild (1)

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