Todd James's new exhibition, Musical Chairs, at Galleria Patricia Armocida, represents a visual bridge between James’s oil stick paintings exhibited in Copenhagen and New York in 2023, and his signature acrylic canvas paintings from past exhibitions.
Combining drawing with painting, these new works represent a further evolution of the artist’s style, where the canvas iterations embrace the method and spirit of his gouache and graphite originals on paper. The intentionally rough, incisive lines of the oil sticks emphasize the perfection of the acrylic color fields, enlivening and humanizing the composition.The subject matter sees James bobbing in and out of many of his well-established themes, never abandoned but revisited: coffee cups, lush house plants, ashtrays, analog telephones, cats, and the eponymous chairs are household totems that have populated Todd James’s oeuvre for the last two decades and that evoke the silent power and beauty of the everyday. The interiors, imbued with a familiar atmosphere and reassuring with their humanity, merge into the worlds James creates seamlessly, combining and exhibiting, for the first time, these new styles and techniques in Musical Chairs.
