Contributed by Katy Crowe / Michael Handley and Greg Lindquist’s show at the Landing Gallery – identified by the emoji for fire – could not have been more poignantly timed. It coincides with California’s fire season and more particularly the destructive Mountain Fire just north of Los Angeles, beyond that with drought-induced fires on the east coast, including Brooklyn’s Prospect Park, and with an incendiary presidential election.
Handley’s and Lindquist’s works are handsome together in the Landing’s generous space. Lindquist’s modestly sized – less frequently, small – horizontal paintings interrupt Handley’s large vertical ones, which are hung in pairs. Both are impressionistic, but the similarities end there. Handley’s works are abstract while referencing landscapes. The materials he uses – Kolor Kut, used to gauge the amount of water in a gas tank, and wildfire retardant – are industrial and for an artist unconventional. Atop black underpainting, the white retardant reacts chemically to the Kolor Kut to produce an active, textured surface. It’s hard not to wonder about the toxic properties of these materials and question the conceit of using them to make fine art. But while less socio-politically loaded products could yield similar visual effects, Handley’s edgy choice is constructively provocative and the paintings themselves are undeniably beautiful.
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Trigger one, trigger two. North by Northeast and Heavy Acid King feel like intimate views of fire, the color soft and luscious as well as dark. The verticality of all Handley’s paintings and his mostly vertical gestures suggest forest. Retardant sprayed over dry hillsides or woodlands is red, too, and White Columns and Red and yellow, red and yellow, red and yellow seem to present landscapes drenched with it. There is no air in these images, the fire is suffocating, and, improbably, they emanate evolving coolness.
All of Lindquist’s paintings are hot. They appear to be painted from photographs found in news publications or stills from television reports, and mostly depict fires in California, though a few were in Turkey and Portugal. His pointillist sensibility and high-contrast oil palette, enhanced by metallic and iridescent pigments, uncannily simulate the appearance fire at night and impart a vivid you-are-there feeling of heat and smoke.
Heatwave (105 Wildfires Burn Across 35 Towns in Turkey) appears positively molten: a beautiful landscape lit from within by what look to be fireworks exploding in the midst of the fire, causing trees and shrubbery in the foreground to shimmer with violet and green.
California Wildfire II is a larger version of the original California Wildfire, presenting the same house engulfed in flames. The fire has blown out the windows and consumed almost everything in the house. The heat a fire generates can be as high as 2000 degrees F. Nothing survives except maybe a ceramic or a metal object with a higher melting point. The smaller of the two pieces is tenderly painted, its diminutive size and daubed, textured pigment imparting intimacy. The larger piece is less painterly and composed from a slightly different angle. A car at the very right of the painting is soon to be engulfed, no doubt. The green tree suggests a light source from behind the viewer, but it’s in flames as well.
Images of wildfires look essentially the same wherever they are located. They serve as an apt metaphor for our time. These paintings reflect the grim reality of disruptive wars, floods, politics, climate change, and fires without prejudice.
“Michael Handley and Greg Lindquist: 🔥,” The Landing, 5118 W. Jefferson Boulevard, Los Angeles, CA. Through December 21, 2024.
About the author: Katy Crowe is a Los Angeles-based painter, working in oil and watercolor, whose last solo show was in 2022 at As Is Gallery in LA.
