Continuing through May 1, 2010
Jeff Elrod is a nimble painter. He paints deftly and keenly, using the computer to draw forms he then projects, translating them into tight, clean painted renderings on the surface of rectangular canvases. While it is conceivable that a few other young artists are doing similar work -colliding fields of form that move easily from computer to drawing to painting -Elrod must nonetheless be hailed for channeling a high-tech incarnation of art brut, giving it a whole new life. There is a blocky black robot nested within a larger version of the same figure in the lower right corner of "The Meeting." In it Elrod goes punkish on Jean Dubuffet's intentionally raw mid-twentieth-century vision, replacing the seemingly hands-on child-like rendering of a robot with the cold digital device of repetitive stacking. Elrod sets in motion a unique sense of mise en abyme, reworking that literary idea of "placing into infinity" but applied to forms that seem like computer-aided cut-and-paste logic, or electronic music sampled ad infinitum.
