by
Alec Clayton
Published in the Weekly Volcano, Aug. 30, 2017
 |
| “Le Petit Prince,” video and book by Troy Gua, courtesy Feast Art Center |
In
the art of Troy Gua we see the reincarnation of the minds of Andy Warhol and
Marcel Duchamp. His art is conceptual, brilliant, funny, and
drawn/painted/built with exquisite craftsmanship.
He
is famous regionally, and should be famous nationally and even internationally,
for his pop hybrid portraits of celebrities and for his series of hand-made
dolls, books and videos for the artist formerly and
forever known as Prince.
The
pop hybrid portraits are portraits of famous people painted in a pop art
fashion much like Warhol’s famous portraits of Marilyn Monroe, Elvis Presley
and others. They are more precisely painted than Warhol’s and without his colors
printed off-register. The unique character of Gua’s portraits is that he
typically combines and overlaps two or more portraits in such a way that they
might look like one of the subjects and then change in the viewer’s eye to the
other. Sometimes figuring out who they are is a delectable puzzle. Often he
combines people who have things in common, be it a name or profession or other
similarities, such as Martin Luther King and Elvis (the King of rock and roll),
or computer pioneers Bill Gates and Steve Jobs. In reviewing his show at
Fulcrum Gallery for this newspaper in 2013, I described his pop hybrids as
“slick and polished as custom
made cars and as clever as the most inspired work of a Madison Avenue ad
writer." Now they are even more polished. The earlier ones were painted in
acrylic on canvas; the new ones are sealed with a resin coating.
There are two pop hybrids in this show,
one of Marilyn Monroe and Albert Einstein called “The Brains and Beauty (First
Try)” and one that is a self-portrait combined with Prince. Which brings us to
“Le Petit Prince.”
Gua clearly loves Prince. Over the years
he has made countless little handmade dolls
of Prince and put them in many different settings and made movies and
books about him. At one point the rock idol’s lawyers hit Gua with a cease-and-desist order.
There is a “Le Petit Prince” corner in
the gallery with a video, a book and two Prince-like dolls of Gua and his wife on
a couch watching the video. As the pop-hybrid
portrait indicates, the Prince and Gua have become so thoroughly associated in
his art that it becomes almost impossible to tell them apart.
In addition to these works, there is an
intriguing memorial to 9/11 with two blank canvases standing in for the twin
towers and a “paper airplane” made of folded canvas flying into one of the
towers. There are also a number of pieces that make sly references to art
galleries such as “Sold,” a red dot on the head of a pin in a white shadow box
— referencing the reddots that are traditionally place next to artworks in
galleries that have sold.
There is
also a group of large commercial logos for imaginary companies that are cast in
resin and make for stunningly beautiful abstract sculptures and similarly two
sets of emojis set as hieroglyphics of the future.
The show is called SMÖRGÅSBORD because it is a
mixture of many different works done over a ten-year period. Only a fraction of it is mentioned in this review,
and even a smaller fraction is shown at Feast. I highly recommend that you
visit the show to see the work in person, and then look the artist up online to see examples of the many varied works he has
produced.
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