Firstly, apologies for my blog absence, dear readers: a long life is a busy life, and all that that entails. The blogosphere exhausts me, but also emboldens me. I only hope that, on the balance, I give as much as I take.
I'm proud to announce the long awaited web portfolio site of my great friend Matt Rebholz, at www.mattrebholz.com. Any one of you that are on the web and a Rebholz fan will know that this was a long time coming, and is sure to enrich the web art community in untold ways.
I have a complicated relationship with Matt: I met him during play auditions in 8th grade. I was up for the role of a young Christopher Columbus (the older iteration of which went to this chump), and he was drawing manga before manga was cool on the auditorium floor. I rudely told him I thought the arms on his character were too long, he rightly rebuffed me haughtily, and we're still strong friends today.
Let me riff for a sec on Rebholzian art, and say that it is, unto itself, a very organic beast. Rebholz' obsessions with teeth, penises, liquids, scales, fur, and hair, parlay an animalistic and raw notion that is constantly attempting to break through a constructed fabrice: even buildings, structures, and mechanics all have an organic tilt in the world of Rebholz. It is a monstrous menagerie of imagination, deviancy, and nightmare-ish illusions that (at least my take on the) art has little seen since Maurice Sendak. Besides being one of my best friends for more that 15 years, I also inhabited the great City of Angeles with him for a period, and that too comes through: the raw, heretical, beastial notions of existence that Los Angeles proffers up to it's profane gods. Rebholz' artistic vision, still in it's early stages but already frighteningly good, captures with outrageous poignancy the obsessions of our obsessed culture, ranging from drugs to conspiracy to the commodification of art itself.
