Sit-ups Leg-lifts, 2012 Acrylic, string, and tracing paper on canvas 46.25 x 60.25 in
Reading Tolstoy in bed. Exercising on a sea foam green mat. Enjoying pizza and beer with old friends. These are the humdrum subjects crystallized in Mernet Larsen’s paintings. Through Larsen’s gaze, the everyday happenings stretch and warp into uncanny structures you vaguely recognize but can’t quite pinpoint. Staring at a painting feels like dreaming about an old friend, yet envisioning him with an altogether different face.
Mernet Larsen, at 75 years old, has only recently begun to show her work outside her home state of Florida. The artist has been painting avidly since the 1960s, and has served as an art professor at the University of South Florida since 1967. In 2012, Roberta Smith reviewed her exhibition at Vogt Gallery in New York, contending “her efforts are extremely viable participants in an extensive, possibly global conversation about how to portray modern, three-dimensional life on two-dimensional surfaces.”
Larsen’s upcoming solo exhibition “Chainsawer, Bicyclist, and Reading in Bed,” is her first in Los Angeles. And it’s the artist’s first time in the city as well.
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In essence, Larsen’s paintings let you have your aesthetic cake and eat it too. The canvases capture origami worlds where remarkably familiar details like linoleum flooring, red checkered tablecloths, and unflattering eyeglasses are coupled with bizarre intrusions — breasts like sideways pyramids, legs that stretch on for days, ears fastened to floating cubes for no apparent reason. What Larsen creates is an alternate reality, assembled, styled and governed on nothing but its own terms.
Stare-at-a-couch-until-you-stumble-upon-a-couch way of seeing. Stare-at-the-subway-until-you-discover-a-subway way of seeing. Stare-at-a-cow-until-you-chance-on-a-cow way of seeing. Suddenly the stuff of everyday life is looking pretty alien and living at home isn’t quite so dull.
Mernet Larsen’s “Chainsawer, Bicyclist, and Reading in Bed” runs until April 11, 2015 at Various Small Fires in Los Angeles.
