John Seal

Like many artists of the post-painting-is-dead school of painting, Seal’s default style is a wry mix of faux–naïf and thrift-store aesthetics. His banal images (sometimes rendered in thick impasto, other times finely delineated) and objects are situated within a long tradition of elevating the quotidian to the status of high art, with its concomitant rise in prices. But his efforts are also apiece with the more recent discourse contextualizing the making of art in contemporary culture as something impossible or even pointless. (Though that hasn’t deterred him or anyone else from trying.) This show features paintings on plywood cutouts of sweatshirts and socks limned with Sunday-painter abstractions. There is also a kind of Adirondack-style tableau, which includes a decoy duck slathered in thick pigment.