Continuing through September 7, 2010
Harold Fox has been making dark, witty paintings of urban angst for at least 40 years, but he'd never had a gallery show until his son started shopping the work around and putting the images on the net. That's part of their pleasure here, this sense that the artist has labored for decades on a kind of art-island in Long Beach, entirely for his own pleasure and edification. The results are a quirky vision so consistently smart, cynically pointed and beautifully painted that you can't believe these paintings haven't always been a part of the underground contemporary art scene or ever been shown alongside artists like Robert Williams and Todd Schorr.
Like those artists Fox is a prodigious surrealist pictorial storyteller who melds together elements of Pop culture with his own affection for film noir staging, sexy pin ups, Renaissance glazing techniques in rich color and Germanic mythology. His oil on scrap panel paintings, mounted in perfectly chosen thrift store frames are luminous and insightful personal rumination's on the state of the world, the U.S. in particular. They bite with a disappointment bred in the aftermath of the Second World War but seem fresh and perhaps even more true in the tattered military/economic landscape of the present one.
