Still-life paintings of flowers are rarely what come to mind when regarding recent contributions to conceptual art.
Yet, in speaking with Daniel J. Glendening, an artist better known for his “improvised” concrete and lumber installations, it’s clear that the straightforward act of picking flowers and painting them can yield work that will rattle one’s consciousness and challenge their ambivalence towards societal constructs.
I caught a selection of his recent works at Escolar, an art and design research collective housed in a shipping container on a one-acre regenerative farm in Santa Rosa.
Since 2018, curator Nathan Azhderian has been rolling out a steady stream of contemporary openings that work to dismantle the artifice and posturing that has become synonymous with modern art events. Glendening’s exhibition, In Bloom, presents a sampling from the large body of paintings he has been generating since 2020.
Admitting that flowers are “hard to paint” was a challenge that both kept Glendening’s interest and seemed to liberate his joy in times of death and uncertainty. The images, rendered in oil, are decadently beautiful and appear to radiate off the canvases with psychedelic glee.
Parallel to the floral pieces emerged a more concerted effort to symbolize the commodification, and subsequent death, of social movements in music. Layers of carefully painted and often illegible text coexist with the iconic branding of bands such as the Grateful Dead, Circle Jerks and Nirvana. These compositions are hypnotic, and their slow-to-reveal sublayers evoke the sensation of one’s subconscious mind trying to place a familiar feeling.
Crowning “In Bloom,” the artist’s title piece, is an attempt to reconcile these diverging themes. The introduction of the florals on the canvas adds a body that bridges the plummeting graphics. Though the artist considers the work only “somewhat successful,” I perceive Glendening’s new direction as a hopeful effort to reintroduce natural and life-giving energy to a counterculture hollowed by capitalism.
For more information, visit escolar.center.
