Carefree Attitudes, Inc., the title of a new painting
Carefree Attitudes, Inc., the title of a new painting by David Humphrey, could function as a moniker for this entire exhibition. Humphrey’s new paintings portray groups of figures in bucolic settings such as living rooms or creamy soft-focus landscapes. They are an extension of the artist's previous work, which he referred to as "Love Teams"; yet, rather than highlighting the awkward coupling enacted by those earlier bodies, Humphrey has coaxed this current cast of characters into playfully impossible tangles and leisure-time horseplay
Humphrey’s new brand of team spirit is exercised through an inventive painting language that interweaves a variety of vernaculars, from simplified cartooning and descriptive modeling to associative improvisation and immaterial technological effects. The arcadian or pastoral genre provides idealized locales as well as an unexpected dialogue with european avant-garde painting from the beginning of the just ended century. Humphrey's paintings celebrate our never complete, but eternally recurring, efforts to describe the vicissitudes of love.
