A house is not necessarily a home. In Matty Byloos' world, it's not even a house, really.
The Los Angeles native uses the elements of the Angeleno domestic landscape to test the frontiers between figure and ground, between the presumed "subject" of the picture and everything around it. The paintings in Byloos' solo show at Dust Gallery mostly set gables and chimneys under richly toned and textured skies that are scored by thin horizontal lines. The streetscapes unravel toward the bottom of each picture, with the hard edges of rooflines dissolving into swirling washes or terminating in cauliflower outlines.
A 2001 master of fine arts graduate of Pasadena's Art Center College of Design, Byloos also holds a bachelor's degree in English from Santa Clara University. This melding of backgrounds, perhaps, enables him to lend a new context to archi-speak words such as "vernacular" and "vocabulary." Byloos wields the vernacular, everyday elements of architecture's vocabulary, its familiar forms, as if they were, indeed, words in an experimental narrative, the kind with phrases cut-up and re-spliced in configurations that provoke peculiar associations in the reader's mind.
The gable-and-chimney figure, though, is so deeply connotative that you can't help wondering if Byloos' compositions are intended as critiques of the domestic world. No, says the artist, who was on hand for the First Friday reception last week. The associations are more of the personal, autobiographical variety, referencing the memories of walking the neighborhoods of his youth.
So they are not purely formal exercises, but their meanings have more to do with how we perceive familiar environments than with what we think about them. Rooflines and treelines glide in and out of mental focus, sometimes seen as detailed entities, sometimes as murky outlines, even as we believe we perceive things clearly.
The formal issues, however, predominate. In a way, Byloos' paintings recall Richard Diebenkorn's figurative work from the 1960s, neighborhoods and domestic interiors that Diebenkorn did not depict so much as arrange in fine formal harmony. Byloos pursues similar ends, but with different means, deconstructing the streetscape to play with textures and densities, figure and ground. In "Do the Strand," a thick sky that modulates between gray and Prussian blue presides over blocky, roofed forms. Horizontal stripes indicate clapboarding, perhaps, and a murky wash—trees or bushes—balances with panels of thick marbled yellow and garnet, while a picket fences appears to lift away from its rightful spot.
This last touch hints at further disruption of domestic tranquility in the adjacent painting, "Water Getting Hotter." Here, a hipped roof seems to spin up and away into a streaked tan sky, and the Prismacolor lines that score other skies have become laser-beam-like, shooting in all directions, possibly orchestrating the house breakup.
This compositional approach carries through a suite of untitled drawings in the back room. In these, unhinged houses become vectors and rectangles floating in wine-red acrylic washes, with no hint of horizon. These are smaller works, more about tension and balance.
Although all of this work is accomplished, you get the sense Byloos is still working something out, and that rooflines taking flight augur further refinements. Diebenkorn returned to pure abstraction, and perhaps that's where Byloos is headed. Or he could reground his gables and chimneys in ways that exploit the play of tones and textures even more rewardingly.
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Casey Weldon also paints unnatural skies, with an emphasis on texture and tactility, but his show at the Trifecta Gallery, Etcetera Plethora, has almost nothing to do with formal exercise.
Rather, Weldon's paintings play with the tradition of surrealism, his slightly stylized figures occupying vaguely disturbing landscapes. In "The Keeper and the Kept," a tiara-crowned woman stands beneath a grotesquely hot-pink sky, beside a man in a beekeeper suit. Her pageant sash asks "Forever???" in a touch of overkill that edges the painting toward illustration.
At times, his paintings seem merely harmless and amusing, as in "What the Future Used to Look Like," with its jetpacking, 1950s family. But other paintings are more hard-edged and querulous, not merely quirky, like "Applebomb," in which a kimono-clad woman with exaggerated eyes proffers an egg hatching a blue squid, while stylized bombers rake a greenish sky. Instead of pointing you to what you should think, this painting troubles and tantalizes. And it tells you that Weldon, too, might, have more in store.