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Paintings are not especially high-tech. Made of colored dirt that's ground into powder, dissolved in viscous liquids and smeared on flat surfaces with hair-tipped sticks, these crusty artifacts have roots that go all the way back to cavemen.
Thomas Whittaker Kidd savors painting's inefficient particularities. At Acme Gallery, the 13 oils in his profoundly generous L.A. solo debut celebrate the hard-to-explain hours that go into an activity that can almost never be justified in terms of an hourly pay rate.
It looks as if time stands still for the Culver City-based artist as he gets lost in the gorgeously painted details of his oddly believable landscapes.
There's so much going on in every patch of grass, soil and sky that it's obvious Kidd was wholly absorbed by every brush stroke and, consequently, was unaware of time's passage, not to mention the world around him.
For viewers, the opposite is true.
To stand before Kidd's potent pictures of regular guys doing everyday things in recognizable settings is to travel backward and forward through time. His images, most of them large, are windows onto prehistory and the future, which looks post-apocalyptic. As a group, they make you feel at home in both ages, which aren't all that different from the strange times in which we are living.
In one, a man wearing a welder's mask uses a beast of burden to plow a field near downtown Los Angeles. In another, a middle-age man rides a homemade paddle-bike to a verdant island around which old tires float like soap bubbles through the sorbet-tinted sky. In a third, a man pulls a rowboat ashore from a hot-pink river beneath an overpass. In the background, ghostly cowboys ride among giant translucent orbs, and hubcaps hover like spaceships amid dust motes that reflect the setting sun's light with the intensity of fireflies.
And that's just the tip of the iceberg.
In other paintings, hippies, hobos and grunge rockers hang out in a goth version of the Garden of Eden. A nude man with long blond hair looks as if he has ingested enough hallucinogens to make the Frisbee he's reaching for travel in super-slow-motion -- right along with its two-dozen doppelgangers. Bulldozers, burning houses and cows being airlifted by helicopters...