A Little Taste of Cheeto in the Night at Château Shatto

source: tmagazineblogsnytimes

When Parker Ito was growing up in Seal Beach, a small city in Orange County, California, he watched David Copperfield DVDs assiduously. He dreamed of being a magician. “Then, I wanted to be a professional skateboarder,” the artist, 28, said from a folding chair set atop the barren rooftop of his Los Angeles studio in the El Sereno neighborhood. It was a few weeks before his new, knotty multimedia show, “A Lil Taste of Cheeto in the Night,” would open in a 7,800-square-foot warehouse in Downtown Los Angeles, adjacent to Château Shatto, the gallery co-owned by Ito’s girlfriend and art dealer, Liv Barrett.

In his busy workspace below, Ito’s studio assistants were perched on scaffolding as they studiously worked from photographs and printouts to render massive two-sided paintings, which were now hanging shambolically on chains from the rafters of the exhibition warehouse. The paintings dally between appropriated logos from the ’90s skateboarding brand Hook-Ups; images of Ito as a Joan of Arc figure; and representations of the Western Exterminator, an Angeleno billboard staple depicting a tophatted man scolding a mouse while holding a mallet behind his back.

Ito is well known for hiring skilled painters as his studio assistants and paying them a fair wage (and sometimes giving them full credit as the artists of an exhibition, as he did at the London gallery White Cube last year) to realize his concepts. Often, this rankles critics who prefer that the artist’s hand touches the work — the sort of question of fabrication that Donald Judd raised in the 1960s and that has critically dogged Jeff Koons’s practice.

Ito tries to remove as much of himself from the process as possible, aside from an approval procedure; and because of his assistants’ distinct abilities, the studio creates works that vary greatly in technique. The pieces through which he first achieved prominence while still a student at California College of the Arts in Oakland — paintings of “the parked domain girl,” a fresh-faced co-ed who appears as a placeholder on countless unconstructed web addresses across the Internet — come in all types, from one that apes the street-art wheatpaste style to one that is completely abstracted to one done as an anime.

In fact, for Ito, variety is the only constant. He even switches his name up, going by pseudonyms such as Deke McLelland Two, Creamy Dreamy and Parker Cheeto. The idea that most artists end up finding and perfecting a style, which they’re expected to maintain for the rest of their lives, frightens him. “I never wanted to be someone who had an ability to do anything,” Ito said. “I never wanted to be someone who could paint really well or draw really well. I always want my work to be changing and shifting, and I never want to be set in something, so I purposefully never learned to do anything. I really try to make everything at this point.”

“A Lil Taste of Cheeto in the Night,” his biggest show yet, which opened over the weekend, is the culmination of two years of Ito figuring out how to present his artwork in a yearlong series under one umbrella. Previously, there was a show done anonymously and semi-secretly in a cafe in Atwater Village, consisting solely of still life paintings of roses, followed by an exhibition at the cramped Echo Park gallery Smart Objects. The third iteration came last July, after Jay Jopling, the owner of the prominent London gallery White Cube (which represents Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin among others), dropped by Ito’s studio and offered him a show. Ito was hesitant, having made the decision to shun big galleries; he compromised by doing the show, but giving credit to his assistants — and Parker Cheeto, of course. “I was really trying to take a break this year,” he says. “I really wanted to carve my own path and avoid commercial galleries.”

Ito dislikes openings, so “A Lil Taste of Cheeto in the Night” did not have one. The exhibition’s announcement came in the form of a newsprint booklet containing a love letter written to Ito by Barrett. And Ito has painted Barrett into one of the show’s paintings (though he had to redo it in the weeks leading up to the show, because “her nose was all wrong,” Ito says).

Alongside 33 paintings, 19 bronze sculptures of the Western Exterminator in all forms are hung from chains or positioned on top of other works. Sloppy ceramics are scattered through the space, string lights are haphazardly threaded through holes in the ceiling like the nest of wires at the back of a computer desk, and several fake palm trees — the same kind used to mask cellphone towers — will be right at home when they are installed in the next few weeks of the ever-changing exhibition.

If anything, Ito is the type of artist that sends critics into fits. The New York Magazine art critic Jerry Saltz called him mediocre in one article, lumping him into the “zombie abstraction” dogpile in another, Ito having been caught up in the whole mess surrounding the art advisor Stefan Simchowitz’s price goosing and art flipping. The art-world gossip has affected the way critics approach Ito’s work. “It turns people off to my work before they even look at it,” says Ito. “It’s hard for me to know if people have even seen a lot of the stuff I’ve done.”

Ito is hoping that this show changes the perspective of how his work is seen, a daunting task in the art world. Ito can’t say for sure exactly where he falls in the art-making genres, but what he does know is that he will always be switching it up, keeping people guessing and trying to keep it interesting for himself through adaptation. “Even though I’ve made so many bodies of work that look totally different, people tell me there’s a feeling that, when they see my work, they know it’s mine,” he said. “So even my attempts to destroy myself, I’m still myself, I guess.”
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source: lucegallery

Considerato per lungo periodo come un artista web, Parker Ito si discosta dalla net art, ma abita internet come fosse il proprio studio. Si pone in modo trasgressivo con opere inaspettate ed accostamenti kitsch, utilizzando vernici riflettenti e cangianti che gli consentono di catturare la natura piu’ recondita del colore quasi a piegarlo alle propria volontà. Al contempo le opere cambiando radicalmente con la luce o la posizione dello spettatore creano un effetto optical sfuggendo alla propria identificazione.
La sua ricerca è incentrata sul rapporto tra individuo e web, tra persona fisica ed il proprio “doppio virtuale”, ovvero quell’entità che vive e si muove nella rete, nei social networks, dotata di password alla quale ormai siamo tutti connessi giorno e notte senza interruzioni. Secondo la metafora narrativa dell’artista, anche l’opera d’arte, a sua volta dotata di un corpo fisico al pari di un essere umano, possiede un proprio “doppio virtuale” che si compone dell’immagine stessa dell’opera fotografata in digitale e riprodotta nella rete.
Per Parker Ito paradossalmente non esistiamo più come esseri umani nel momento in cui le nostre password sono scollegate, risultando inibito l’accesso alla rete. Analogamente l’opera d’arte non esiste senza il suo doppio virtuale.
L’artista in modo pragmatico pone l’accento sul proprio ego e sull’amore come unici karma in cui riporre la propria credenza ed il suo manifesto diventa la libera rappresentazione che possiamo osservare nelle creazioni fotografiche sui wallpaper dove l’artista concede sfogo ai propri istinti dimostrando tutta la sua ecletticità e l’interesse per il cambiamento.
Come in un gioco Parker Ito si identifica nella molteplici personalità che si riflettono nella sua opera. La sua identità artistica è in continua trasformazione, e lui stesso viene chiamato con i diversi Nicknames che col tempo si è dato definendosi Cheeto, Burrito, Deke2 ed altri appellativi.
L’accostamento tra reale e virtuale traspare nelle opere, dove dipinto e fotografia appaiono assemblati in un’unica immagine, come l’artista net si scontra con l’artista reale avendone la peggio. Questa contrapposizione pero’, si affina col tempo, fino a trasformarsi in unicità di immagine, in una dualità che porta l’unificazione nella coerenza del lavoro. L’incessante uso di un linguaggio astratto si accompagna a tematiche classiche dell’arte figurativa, come i fiori od i paesaggi, camminando sul filo tra astrattismo come negazione della figura, e figurativo riferito all’impressionismo di Seurat e Monet.
Con la tecnica del getto d’inchiostro su tela di seta, coprendo la superficie di punti colorati, le immagini in mostra vengono riprodotte come un ingrandimento zoommato che si frammenta in pixels.
I singoli punti si disgregano dalle forme e l’immagine a prima vista appare astratta, ma in ultima analisi il richiamo è volto all’impressionismo francese, con un accostamento alla sua percezione visiva, in un’elegante combinazione tra arte contemporanea nelle forme più fresche e visioni figurative riferite ai classici della storia dell’arte.
Questa sinergia proveniente dall’arte digitale si trasforma nell’evoluzione di immagini tratte dal computer, con l’illusione di osservare lo schermo del pc, vedendo punti che si trasformano in cellule, palloncini, caramelle e forme dall’interpretazione soggettiva.
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source: lucegallery

Considered for some time as a web artist, Parker Ito took distance from the net art, but it’s based in internet as a platform for his studio. With trasgressive and unexpected works, with the use of reflecting materials, he shows his interest in owning the most hidden nature of colour as to fold to his desire. Meantime the works radically changing with the light or the position of the viewer, create an optical effect escaping to a precise identification.
The research is on the relationship between the person and the web, between his fisicality and his virtual double, or the entity that lives and moves throught the social networks, accompained by his password to which we are connected day and night without break. According to the artist’s narrative metaphor also the artwork in turn has his physical body like a human, and his virtual double, that is composed by the image of the artwork itself, digitally photographed and reproduced in the web.
For Parker Ito paradoxically we exhist no more as humans in the moment when our passwords are disconnected, with the inhibition to access to the internet system. Equally the artwork doesn’t exist without his virtual double.
In a pragmatic way the artist emphasizes his ego and love as the only karma in which he believes, and the manifesto becomes the free representation that we can see in the wallpapers, photographic creations where the artist give vent to his own instincts demonstrating all his eccentricity and his interest for changes.
Like in a play Parker Ito identifies himself in the multiples personalities that reflect his own work. His artist identity is in a ‘continuo’ transformation, and also his name changes as Cheeto, Burrito, Deke2 and others.
The overlap between real and virtual is evident in the work, where painting and photograph look together in a unique image, as the net artist clashes with the real artist loosing his point. But this polarity becames gradually less visible with a final transformation in a unique image that brings to the coherence of the work. The continuous use of abstract language is accompained to references of classic figurative art, with subjects like flowers or landscapes, and Parker Ito walks on the limits between abstraction as a negation of the figure, and figurative reference to the impressionism of Seurat and Monet.
With the tecnique of the hand applied inkjet on silk, covering the surface of coloured dots, the reproduction of the image is a zoomed magnification broken in pixel fragments.
The single dots are disgregating in forms and the images at first sight looks abstract, but ultimately the recall is oriented to the french impressionism, with a combination to his visual perception, in a elegant duality between contemporary art in the more fresh forms and figurative visions referred to the classics of history of art.
This sinergy coming from the digital art is trasformed in the evolution of images coming from the computer, and the viewer have the illusion of being in front a pc screen, looking dots that are transforming in cells, balloons, and form of free interpretation.