Luke Butler: Color Pictures

Charlie James Gallery is pleased to present Luke Butler: Color Pictures, the artist’s third solo exhibition with the gallery. San Francisco-based Butler draws inspiration from pop culture and the history of film and television in luscious, evocative paintings that invite the viewer into imagined cinematic worlds. By transforming images from his lived experience – natural and urban landscapes, objects saved or remembered – into paintings heavy with narrative potential, Butler plays with the tension between reality and artifice that is inherent to film. These invented bits of pop cultural history feel as if they have always existed, as if we should know what comes next. But however potently Butler’s Color Pictures suggest action, they never reveal it, standing continually on the precipice of narrative.

The Color Pictures series takes its form from the openings of 1960s movies and TV, which triumphantly declared their evolution from black and white into color. Butler consumed these in syndication as a child, long after color became the norm, rendering this declaration as something outside of time and therefore ripe for examination. Butler treats the text almost as a figure in the landscape, existing object-like amid the drama about to unfold. These works build upon a previous series of paintings that played with the tragicomic existential tension of end cards, endlessly proclaiming The End. The Color Picture series instead offers a beginning, or many beginnings. Set against images of the great American landscape or the architectural jumble of urban life, these works serve as an invitation to narrative, offering the viewer a feeling of infinite possibility.

The Location paintings build upon this cinematic theme, each declaring its time and place like so many title cards or script directions. Enigmatic Los Angeles alleyways and the humbler New York City skylines serve as containers for Butler’s atmospheric scene-setting, bounded within painted borders that emphasize their cinematic quality. As with the Color Pictures, these works come from photographs taken by the artist but trade in the crispness of photography for much a looser hand. The softness of Butler’s landscapes recalls the vast painted worlds of classic Hollywood backdrops or the hazy glow of memory.

The source images Butler is drawn to often embody a sense of drama – low sun hitting a towering cliffside, restless sea meeting a rocky coastline – that is in keeping with the cinematic overtones of the paintings. He expands his sensual scope in two symphony paintings, which introduce the idea of music into the work, conjuring movie scores and concert halls via crashing waves and floating flowers. Butler’s confident hand captures a distinct sense of arrested motion, his musical references emphasizing the feeling of catching just a single frame of a film strip speeding by or a dance frozen mid-step.

The exhibition also includes a suite of watercolors of Star Wars action figure packaging, painted to scale. A lover of genre film and television from childhood, the roots of Butler’s artistic consciousness lie in the graphics of pop culture. He lovingly captures not only the iconic Star Wars design, but the wear and tear that comes with enthusiastic use. Each crinkled corner and torn edge speaks to life lived. A rectangle of solid color, framed by exposed cardboard, emphasizes the absence of the figure itself. As with the paintings, these works suggest grand narratives unfolding just off-screen, so to speak, whether in a film about to begin or an action figure reenactment playing out nearby.