Review: Tear apart, assemble, repeat. Peeling the layers of Zhou Yilun’s ‘Ornament and Crime’ - Los Angeles Times
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Review: Tear apart, assemble, repeat. Peeling the layers of Zhou Yilun’s ‘Ornament and Crime’

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Art Critic

Raw and brutish, paintings by Zhou Yilun are assembled from scraps.

For his second show at Nicodim Gallery, some bits are physical, as in collage; others are imagistic, as in layered pictures. He’s a bricoleur, puttering about with whatever comes to hand.

Zhou shows 10 recent paintings, most assembled from painted canvas glued to large sheets of thick, foil-covered, foam-board insulation. Two free-standing sculptures are similarly built — totemic, loosely figurative cutouts collaged with athletic gear.

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Throughout, the imagery looks vaguely familiar — shadowy people, often loosely spray-painted, assembled like figures in Old Master European paintings or action photographs from a newspaper’s sports pages. Several works are composed from multiple panels, like altarpieces. Sometimes, the hazy scene is interspersed with sporty products — hipster watches, racing bikes, basketballs and tennis balls — or fragments of cheap wood veneer. Art drowns in blizzards of debris.

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Zhou is based in his birthplace of Hangzhou, China, south of Shanghai. He was born in 1983, heyday of the still-controversial Neo-Expressionist juggernaut that brought Western painting back from what was once claimed to be the brink of extinction.

Titled “Ornament and Crime,” the show comes with a lengthy printed explication of the work’s relationship to the famous essay on superfluous decoration by Modernist architect Adolf Loos, but it doesn’t really need the crutch. A variant of Neo-Ex is all over Zhou’s energetic if not yet fully confident work, albeit in a suitably shabby, tattered and intriguing way.

Nicodim Gallery, 571 S. Anderson St., L.A. Through Feb. 17; closed Sundays and Mondays. (323) 262-0260, www.nicodimgallery.com

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