Sub-Rural #63, Chicago Works | Mike Cloud

A vital part of painting as a medium and practice juggles concerns about what constitutes art history and the public along with questions about a hierarchy in cultural critique, ethnography, craft, and geographic identity. We live in a time where fewer subjects fit comfortably in certain media and some art has subsequently lost credence. If contemporary painting doesn’t calculate factors such as the above it may not actually be painting. Art expos and museum culture hold less ground as influencers. Reliable value is a phantom. The artworld continues to mediate promising painters who recite faith sub rosa or gather symbols that are conduits for art and psychoanalysis redux. Mike Cloud, however, is one invested in a radical swath of holistic, sometimes vernacular hybridity who transcend epochs – a perfect prospect modernists could not have dreamed of, but a hybrid multi-logical artist it ultimately inspired.

Finality and transcendence in art has been envisaged for a century by artists through a kind the public imagination under the Enlightenment categories of specialization and evolution. Artists of note look to that tradition of superior design intellect with some skepticism, while others look to it with admiration. Artists like Cloud absorb details of those narratives through biography, industry, geography, and structure. Curatorial regimes, determined by radical groupings of discreet forms have expanded and contorted art contexts, but painting and studio organization can de-curate anything like theory which is only alleged.

The feel of Mike Cloud’s de-curation at the Museum of Contemporary Art is wonderfully rural on the surface, not really a regional inflection but a measure of wayfaring, time-framed indulgences. It’s a show with as much virtual pasture space as neo-Dada confiscation. Remnants of agricultural tools, the air of abandoned rail yard debris, illegible logo-forms, lean-to fragments and direction finders point to and rub shoulders with weathered recyclables in backyard Wisconsin monuments. Here the artist explores an obsession for translating consecrated technical and aesthetic manuals into rustic commemorative markers on both sides of the artist/amateur, local/stranger, and author/eraser divides.

Cloud advances a method and a hook, not for finality, preeminence, or style, but as a method for seducing nature, ordinary experience, and labor out of gallery or atelier confinement. He does it with a structural un-designing of painting, an architectural imposition for display, and a gifted consciousness for systems makeover.

His paintings are essentially inverted and bedecked with reflections on discipline deconstruction. They teach us how to build in the rough and ready present, becoming wistful debris of once defenestrated, now recuperative cultural portals.

Cloud’s newest works are multi-trapezoidal bundles, low-relief canvases that define assemblage by highlighting glued and stained stretcher bars constructed with major and minor patterns, maneuverable models, and shapes twisted to reveal multiple treated and untreated surfaces. A discussion of them as pictures is noteworthy but cloudy and ultimately an illusion. Symbols and texts are not what makes the paintings work. Rather, the instincts the artist has for pattern and abstraction with just enough centering of Black and International figuration in perplexingly rural motifs that carry the weight. Unconventionally flat paint, idiosyncratic geometry, and a counterpoint to cottage industry gestural abstraction is outright sport. His strategic suspension from either pole of the symbolic spectrum, a virtual dismissal of AI, consumerism, and spectacle are excellent reasons to inventory his latest multi-stack quasi-transformative painting oeuvre.