LOS ANGELES
Greg Miller: “Unforeseen Frontier”at William Turner Gallery

Graphically satisfying and delicious, Venice-based painter Greg Miller’s new series of oil, paper and resin paintings on panel are luscious, tempting affairs. His works are created though an elaborate process designed for a glamorous effect that prompted essayist Peter Frank to describe Miller’s style as “mediumistic,” meaning heavy-duty in love with his materials. And with the saturated palette and high-gloss finish of the work, it is easy to see how that impression is formed. Resin is not used to create the illusion of depth or even real depth in these paintings, but rather to pop the colors on the surface—deep reds, blues, inky blacks, mottled ivories. It unifies the space but suppresses the brushwork and mark-making. Thus, although stridently handcrafted, his works have an eerie manufactured quality to them, which is reinforced by their source matter.

Miller typically breaks his compositions into four or five segments, rectangles of varying scales, inter-nestled in a Mondrianesque grid rife with information. The rule goes: one giant figure, especially a close-up of a beautiful woman, a prominent piece of text, a subtly jarring counterpart image like the nighttime skyline of L.A. in The New World, or the abstract urban decay suggesting crumbling walls in Your Eyes. Other works in this vein include Authentic, Fudge, Sky Rocket and Realist. There is a hint of David Salle’s recombined narrative threads in Miller’s pursuit of simultaneous conversations, but with a far more dreamy sensibility. But in this series—especially in the newest works—he often departs from that winning formula and includes a few more traditionally single-frame works. Water is a dominant theme, along with leisure in general.

A swimmer in a red suit appears in Hurricane Bay and The Deep End; a surfer bisects the stacked abstract color fields of Good Thing…. The striped inflatable raft that dominates Pool Guy (green) and the backyard Modernism of the glassed-in bungalow and the foregrounding of a sparkling blue retro racer in another piece all hint at a return to narrative and an evolving figurative technique. But pleasure, nostalgia for a time when Pop Art was subversive, and a kind of kitsch Actionism are still the order of the day, even as Miller’s process has grown slicker and more ambitious.