Clintel Steed’s paintings create a visual language that is a way of understanding the world. His work manifests an acute awareness of the history of painting, its potential, and combines it with an unfiltered immediacy. For Allegory of Now, Steed has made a suite of new paintings based on works by canonical painters such as Jacques-Louis David, Peter Paul Rubens, and Giotto. Selected for their subject matter and such universal themes as loyalty, judgment, and punishment, each narrative remains relevant today and is a reflection of how the world feels to the artist now. In The Last Judgment, bodies topple and free-fall towards the abyss — an unpitying metaphor of our mortality and a prescient evocation of our present situation. In Bacchanalia, Steed brings alive the inequity and absurdity in the follies of excess.
In the process of transcribing the compositions, Steed deciphers the hidden geometries in each work, the shapes, colors and connections that make up the whole. There is an unadulterated devotion to the materiality -- surfaces are fragmented, and paint is often thickly layered. In some works he paints and repaints the canvas, building an accumulation of figures and forms in buttery impasto, while in others he works briskly -– wet-on-wet — and lets the white gessoed underpainting crack throughout the composition. In this reworking and re-presenting of classical themes, Steed aims to give us a greater sense of perspective on our current circumstances.
Allegory of Now is on view throughout February 7, 2020 at M+B 612 North Almont Drive Los Angeles, CA. photographs courtesy of the gallery