When people describe his paintings as “absurd”, Calvin Marcus notes that such description is produced out of the feeling that “there shouldn’t be paintings like his”. A floating coca-cola next to an elephant, gigantic nipple on a grass, a naked woman-mountain and cows stretching over the horizon, Marcus’s large paintings are extremely bold in both colour and depiction. The artist is interested in confrontation, with his audience, with an artistic persona, as well as logical parameters of painting as a medium. Stripped of unnecessary detail and drowning in the sea of colour, Marcus’s works are open spaces of unnerving meaning unconnected to one another. Born in 1988 in San Francisco and now based in LA, Marcus creates dazzling uncomfort that strikes directly at his viewer’s subjectivity.
Written by Goldsmiths CCA ...
