Todd Bienvenu

Almine Rech New York is pleased to present an exhibition of new works by Todd Bienvenu. This is Bienvenu's third solo exhibition with the gallery.

Raucously raunchy, hilariously disastrous, and blissfully chill, Todd Bienvenu’s pictorial imaginarium is a hotbed of flailing heroics, hot messes, and heated moments. By way of a thematically wide selection of paintings, collages, and sculptures in JOMO, the artist exploits everything in his toolkit and playbook in an attempt to evoke some sense of how joy, as opposed to fear, might be elicited by the relatively minor social tragedy of ‘missing out. ’There’s no time for FOMO, as it were, since YOLO.

As for joyful imagery, Bienvenu’s offerings are as generously genial in their spins on genre as they are generously sympathetic, generously colorful, generously scaled, and generously, decadently painted. The artist’s generosities feed into and off each other in his works, and over the years, the further he has pushed them – and the more he has allowed them to freely guide his hand and mind as a creative compass – the more resonant, materially present, physically engulfing, and visually trenchant his pictures have become. Bienvenu has always treated his subjects, even his goofiest ones, with warmth and kindness rather than smirking smugness or biting irony, and this sweetly sentimental aspect of his works is enhanced by his preference for ever more vibrant, juicier, at times audacious hues; thicker, richer applications; swathy, patchy, and unbrushy marks that are more manually communicative than gesturally expressive; and imposingly large surfaces that not only command walls and rooms, but that also force the artist to toil longer and harder to get a sufficient count of painstakingly inserted buildings into the deepest distances of a cityscape, or to imbue a convincing sense of vicarious finger-pluck into the twisty-furly obscurities of a moist bikini bottom crannied up into a wedgie.

—Paul D’Agostino, Art Writer

Photo credit: Dan Bradica