Tabboo! Nothing but blue skies from now on

Building on Tabboo!’s decades-long exploration of landscape and the flora and fauna that populate it, this body of work extends his focus to a new setting: nominally, Los Angeles and its surrounding area, but in the artist’s terms, “the Hollywood imaginary.” Tabboo! takes subjects grounded in reality as his starting point, transforming them in his signature style, which he terms “emotional realism.” He embraces the fantasies projected onto the sites that he depicts; in his words, he favors “the visual, the memory, the idea” of Los Angeles over its gritty reality. The exhibition takes its title from the lyrics of Irving Berlin’s 1926 song “Blue Skies,” famous for its juxtaposition of exuberant verses and a discordant minor key. Exploring subjects such as cacti blooming by city sidewalks, the sun setting over the Pacific Ocean, and iconic signs and landmarks, these paintings similarly play with affective ambiguity—is that a golden glow, or smog? 

Tabboo! paints on unprimed canvas, using aqueous pigment to develop vivid color fields as the ground for his subjects. While referencing the formal techniques of color field painters who foregrounded color itself as subject, Tabboo! uses color as a catalyst to convey affect and intimacy. Oranges, ranging from tangerine to burnt umber, dominate the palette in several landscape works, recalling both the “Golden” Age of Hollywood glamor and Los Angeles’ iconic sunsets. In works such as California Sunset and Bright Orange Sunset, Tabboo! uses horizontal strokes and translucent pigment to portray hazy, rolling hills and smoldering dusk. This body of work explores the panoramic and immersive effects of a horizontal picture plane. The landscape perspective harkens back to Tabboo!’s artistic beginnings hand-painting backdrops for drag performances at New York’s storied Pyramid Club. The concept of the backdrop or film set is implicit in the works in Nothing but blue skies from now on, intended not to shift reality itself but rather to revision it in more vibrant hues—a gilded mirage.

The artist explores the hazy threshold between city and wilderness, as well as between memory and reality, in works such as Hollywood, in which palm trees in parallel columns vanish into the horizon, the iconic sign appearing within the veil of distance. In the largest work in the exhibition, Griffith Observatory, the city rests in a valley of blue shadows, framed by an evocative swath of incandescent sky. Atop a brushy hillside sits the observatory, its sights poised for the transition into night. In all its exuberance of gesture, Nothing but blue skies from now on is a flight into the senses and the Hollywood cosmos. This is the world both as Tabboo! sees it and how he wants it: brimming with color and containing no small amount of magic.