This is the Life

Taylor McKimens was born in Seattle (1976), he grew up in Winterhaven, a small town with fewer than 1,000 inhabitants in the Californian desert on the borders of Arizona and Mexico and now lives in New York.
His work is focused on drawing, a style of drawing which shows at first glance the influence of the imagery of comic books.
To my mind, McKimens is one of the finest and most exemplary examples of the artists of the new generation which has developed the expressive power of the image without a familiarity with art, the only way until recently, but instead by devouring comic books. This goes together with a childhood in Winterhaven, exposed to visual seductions, but those brought by mass media, which, by their spectacular nature, truly have the power to penetrate everywhere, far more so than art. As such McKimens only discovered art a long way down his formative journey, by which time the founding experiences, those which make up identity, attitudes and passions, had already taken hold. At this point, reflection on the works of great masters acted to refine and to add understanding, but could no longer find a place amongst the basic ingredients.
It can easily be deduced that an artistic training based on reading comics instead of visiting museums and galleries could bring about a major shift in the approach to the activity of creativity. Indeed it would be natural to have a strong leaning towards the elaboration of the ironic and the grotesque, to hedonism and an easy approach to expression, although this does not mean that there is any less commitment and study. Fundamentally, the same communication media had developed a refined conceptual sophistication, and in much the same way as young artists make use of it, it has made full use of the complex inventions of art. In certain aspects it has brought about the prophecy of a “mass avant-garde”, a controlled experimentation, which, after having tamed its offspring with the irresistible communicative attraction of which it is the uncontested master, has finally made it available to all us mortals.
McKimens draws. The unusual thing is that some of these drawings detach themselves from the paper, as if by magic, and adventure out into reality. He has developed an original technique of gluing the figures cut out of his drawings to wooden or cardboard structures, setting them out to freely occupy the exhibiting space, in such a way as to make it into a colourful parallel universe. However these creations do not acquire an authentic spatial character: on careful examination, McKimens does not renounce drawing, he does not enter into the area of true sculpture. He continues to reason in terms of surface, exactly like that of a sheet of paper, even if this is now self supporting, away from the wall, fitting together with other surfaces of assembled structures, or pushing out in depth, without ever betraying their flatness.
In this way the viewer moves through an environment with paradoxical dimensions, alien to normal three-dimensional perception, subject to brusque contractions and expansions. McKimens’ show thus offers the viewer the fascinating experience of physically falling into the pictorial space, realizing the old dream of leaping into a painting.
The stories find a perfect location in the places and domestic environments where the artist lived in his years in Winterhaven- in this case, the great exhibiting space of the gallery evokes the backyard of a typical American house. In the same way the protagonists are the people he met then, or rather a generic type of human being, which is made up of a sort of synthesis, very similar in its male and female versions.
Drawing on these memories, McKimens creates an outcast and separated world, taken to the extreme by the merciless heat of the South-western desert, which forces things to reveal their sickening truth. A heat which becomes an existential condition, like a plague which grabs hold of everything, working its way even into the molecules, forcing rubber rings and food, cactuses and men in underpants to crumble in a degenerative process, as if they had poured out even their soul in a puddle of sweat.
It is only the insects who seem to resist this inexorable degradation, even benefiting from it, but it is from this degeneration that McKimens draws a highly effective graphic device: a horrible stain, which could either be that which is left of a pack of butter accidentally left out of the fridge, chewing gum chewed up and spat out, a gob of ketchup, a puddle from a water leak, or even more repulsively, the emissions of the human body. In the compositions this takes on a constructive, structural role, as if it was a manifestation of the formless material of creation, the raw matter, in its still unmodified state, from which both men and objects are modelled, and which the torrid heat has reduced, totally or in part, leaving a meal for the flies and the ants.
In some drawings the mark takes on a more compact consistence, which allows it to rise up and turn itself over like an omelette, and in this way by happy chance it is animated like a character in a comic, acting and speaking in a series of frames
There is another presence, and another multiple signifier. It too has an organic aspect, but it is oblong and twisted like a pudding, in one instance it is the lace of a shoe, in another an electric cable or a rubber tube which the temperature has stretched to its limits, making it twist up in unusual coils.
In this context there is nothing for man to do but stay where he is and survive, trying to gather the energy to swallow one last cheeseburger.

-Guido Bartorelli