LOS ANGELES

Entering Kyle Field’s solo exhibition “More Country Questions,” at Taylor De Cordoba, is like stepping into the pages of an art school sketchbook, but without most of the traces of teen angst. Field, a San Francisco-based artist, has the whimsical hand of an imaginative child doodling away in the back row of his math class. The illustrations take on a naive quality, but are paired with a polished pastel palette, rendering them intentionally unresolved.

The small watercolor and ink works-on-paper have a melodious feeling, taking the viewer up and down the surface of the paper as if reading musical notes. This is fitting since Field is a member of the band Little Wings. Presumably, both of his art practices bleed into one another. The Chocolate Shoppe, a small-scale work-on-paper, reads like a map of life, displaying a bombardment of advertisements about chocolates “That Burst in your Mouth!” and little inside jokes about skateboarding wounds to the knee or overheard conversations about religion. Field’s works narrate intertwined personal revelations and unique experiences with the world, in much the same way that lyrics do. The Chocolate Shoppe, though, is more like a jazz piece, with frenetic arrangements of subjects rather than one focus point, or chorus.

Field’s watercolors are as much like children’s book illustrations as they are like songs, with their inviting colors and fanciful characters. Real Snailscene, an ink and watercolor image of a snail surrounded by bountiful flora and flanked by a rainbow, conjures the “Where the Wild Things Are” illustrations of Maurice Sendak. Soft Wood Block, an 11 x 6 inch creation of tiny individual works on paper glued atop a surface of cork, is the Kyle Field answer to a pop-up book. Myriad characters, including gnomes and Yeti, cavort with bikini-clad blondes and robots around a Thanksgiving cornucopia. At the forefront of all of this joviality is a letter “Q” with a question mark inside it—and he means it. The thing about all of this confusion is that you are left to come to your own conclusions about all that you are seeing. Frankly, that is refreshing. With so much magisterial art in the world telling you what to think, sometimes it’s just nice to see a medieval soldier with a giant red beard dancing barefooted with a snake.

“The Chocolate Shoppe,” 2008 , Kyle Field, Ink and watercolor on paper, 7" x 83⁄4"
Photo: courtesy Taylor De Cordoba