Josh Keyes (former Juxtapoz cover artist, February 2010) has become synonymous with creating some of the most insightful and thought-provoking surreal and environmentally charged artwork of anyone working in the 21st Century. The Portland-based painter has become an internationally renowned for his ongoing series of animals placed in a post-human, post-apocalyptic Earth, left behind to sort through the garbage and infrastructure we have left behind. The work always makes you think; did the animals wins? Did Mother Nature conquer? Did really anything or anyone become the victor in the human's demise?
These subjects return and stand at the forefront of Keyes' newest solo show, Tempest, on view at Thinkspace Projects in Culver City, California from October 13—November 3, 2018. What may have changed over the years from Keyes is no longer a white-background, almost minimal style. The works now are lush, filled from end-to-end with an almost hyperreal quality of a world gone wrong. And these are quite hypothetical arrangements or future guessing. The world, the natural world, is in a state of irreparable flux. What Keyes is able to show, through sometimes almost satire, is perhaps the absurdity of what humans will leave behind. Take a step back, and what does a large "76" gas station logo ball really mean? Why did it exist? What does our own art history say about the world we will leave behind?
As the gallery notes, "Keyes has mastered the satirical posturing of hyperbole as fact with a world so convincingly rendered, and so disastrously surreal, that fantasy becomes alarmingly plausible. In Tempest, Keyes conjures an insolvent wilderness facing the eye of a final storm."
"Displaced wild animals and the remnants of human architectures and monuments are all that remain, the only living witnesses to whatever final or cumulative set of events have finally tipped the scales beyond salvage. Recent works have depicted wholly submerged forests, graffiti-tagged marine life, and itinerant polar bears wandering an environmentally exhausted earth. Here, human monuments are drowned by the deluge and incongruous combinations abound as displaced rhinos run rampant beneath abandoned urban underpasses. The traces of our destructive legacy even appear in space, harkening dystopian visions of the final frontier - humanity's last escapist fantasy of evacuating the planet it has consumed."
