4/1/2025
“My Own True Love” a review of Daniel Zeballos in London
Suspended in isolation, two neutral forms flank my periphery as I enter the gallery. Passively, they beseech my periphery as I saunter up the stairs and creek through the space. Humbly, I encounter both pieces peering at each other, their cool interface
narrowly concealing their contempt.
I lie caught in the crosshairs of their frozen glance.
I stumble upon a duel at daybreak. Fog lifts off the grass, and dew collects on their suede boots. They step ten paces and turn.
Glacially, their image materializes to the naked eye. As the fading sun drunkenly plays upon their surface, they unveil themselves to the modern eye. Turning to see Daniel Zabellos’ silverpoint pieces is a practice in decorum as you face, head on, the small 6 x 6 inch-sized image of a clock, cloaked over a tuft of beige-colored linen.
You read the intimately presented timepiece to discover its lack of hands. Time is alluded to in all but the shadow that surrounds the clock itself. The classically rounded objects are preciously squared and stretched over thick oak frames that protrude 2 inches from the wall, deifying them to the point of personification.
Slumping between them, greying into the interior of the narrow space, I am caught in their gaze, for, clocks without hands, all they do is know.
And they know me a bit too well,
so well I feel transparent,
and avert my eyes into the corner,
hoping if I do not gaze at them,
it will not be returned.
Overwhelmed by their knowing, I skulk, gazing instead at the gazers as they gaze upon the works, watching for their encroaching gaze to become encroached. To them, we glance upon the numbers with modern eyes. All knowing what we do not know. That hidden beneath the works, tucked between linen and goat skin, are love letters never to be read, reverberating in their titles ‘Kiss’ and ‘Kiss’. They are object and subject. Drawings that draw time out of us as they draw time from the artist himself.
We look
at the futility of our looking;
the fecundity of our glances shows on our faces
as we check the time,
its intimacy dawning upon us.
Read the room.
8/22/2025
Grey is the weight of the sky passing overhead.
Grey is a single note degrading into silence.
Grey is the color of thought.
A wash of slate grey follows the waxy yellow pallor of the faces of newly deceased persons of influence or otherwise. Grey in its warmth, exemplifying the ochre-dusted concrete underfoot.
Dust like the warm-toned face makeup powdered atop the cheeks of the embalmed, asleep in mortuary basements. They are dolls in perpetual stupor. They are grey warmed. The cold marble, the heavy sky, the empty nonchalance. This is the faceless. It holds no pallor, no depiction, no resemblance to anything human. Standing, petting the wall, unaware of anything besides its cold temperature. Averting its faceless gaze.
These faceless dolls are strewn about the attics of Shelley Uckotter with small tongues of light licking upwards through the slats of floorboards groaning underfoot. It’s the color of light’s unfamiliarity with her skin; so tight and young yet clinging to rotting limbs. A brush with the slick integument of a shark.
Catherine Mulligan then, with her lovely ladies of noble rot, hagspoloited to oblivion, cures her women until their skin dries, flakes, and is blown away by the wind. Her trailer park Bratz babes are tonally tempered in layers of splotched spray tan and shimmering eyeshadow. Their necrosis a personification of Zombie Formalism. Decay is caricatured and spliced between life and death in a state occupied solely by the surgically botched. The blissfully surrealistic body given to your choice of god as a vestigial virgin. Surgery is sex. Sacrificed to some catatonic power in the downy grey light of dawn. Shrouded by a heavy fog, this is witching hour for the truly morose, so dedicated to their charge, they sacrifice their souls every time they go under the knife. No anesthesia is needed, for they are self-sedated.
Soft hands position the frame and sculpt figures from wet clay, from which Theo Mackenzie makes his faceless dolls. Held hostage in the limerence of God’s workshop as an Instagram avatar left unchosen. Gently kneaded, they are modeled in self-conscious positions while the tightly cropped compositions recall crime scene photography. Mannequins arranged with knees bent and cheeks turned away choked by their own imposition: numb to surprise. They seem aware of their incomplete visage being their perfection. Sheltered from completion in suspended adolescence, inhabiting a pearlescent aura of potential.
“There is a thing about a… an unfinished piece of work, a… a thing like this where… do you see? Where perfection is still possible? Because it’s there, it’s there all the time, all the time you work trying to uncover it.” – William Gaddis
In painting, nothing is as sexy, as promising, as delicious as the brink of completion. Tinged with its nondescript affinity to host projections of all sorts. Its clay-like plasticity is so alluring.
In sprawling studies, these grey dolls are desexed by Arthur Marie and laid out in pathological rhythms. They recall the practice of portraiture developed in the Renaissance, wherein paintings would be completed first only tonally, then washed in thin layers of pigment to achieve the correct coloring. His tone, captured in mute opulence, begets a dismissal of baroquely splendid color as rather unpuritanical. Greed of the eye breeds gluttony of the soul. Akin to the fasting rituals of monastic faith to purge insolent sins.
The obtuse posturing and cropped alien compositions of Mackenzie and Uckotter mirror the removal of spatial familiarity with phenomenological imposition, further exasperated by their desaturation. The grey heralds the dissociation implicit within the imagery. There is a scavenging there, digging around the sun-bleached and threadbare artifacts in search of the muse within this rubble of imagery.