Leo Gabin: shocking videos (with teens) at the service of traditional paintings

Ho Ho Click – Bleacherz and Teacherz from Leo Gabin on Vimeo.

 

Leo Gabin trio’s two-dimensional balanced accumulation of colorful signs and images wouldn’t be so interesting if seen just from the point of view of painting. Even in they’re last solo show at Peres Project, which fished a few days ago, they seemed to be too similar to too many artists, from Rauschenberg to contemporaries such as David Ostrowski, Jonathan Binet, Chirs Succo and many other not figurative, not iconic, not representative ones (please note that, intentionally, we are not using the term abstraction). Nevertheless, as Matthew Barney did a decade ago, and as Ostrowski or Torey Thornton are doing today – both of their artworks are indeed video related – Leo Gabin, that is an art collective, correlates canvases with a series of extremely effective short videos, whose common thread could be a certain kind of social network users: disordered, delicate, awkward and always troubled adolescents pictured in their brutal intimacy. Here, possibly, it’s where the novelty of the apparently traditional paintings by the trio lies and what we may call their “software”. Hence the basic Leo Gabin’s web site is at one time the place and the way the form meets the info.

December 15, 2017