PRESS

Insight on JOHN DE LA O’s Art

Part pulp comics, part Pop art, John De La O’s work is a mixture of mass marketed imagery and pop culture, with the added references to the physical locations surrounding the artist’s childhood. Although some of the images used are readily recognizable cartoon and comic books references, he also uses storefront signs and local advertisements from his neighborhood in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. In this way John’s work becomes a complicated, yet lighthearted juxtaposition of both mass media and local culture- his work represents a pop culture memory that is at once identifiable to its viewers yet personal to the artist.

His work takes the mass produced and takes it beyond function and into the realm of art. The backgrounds are done with a contrasting, painterly style, most prominently seen in his Film Noir series, shows a delicate color transition. This contrasts to the graphic manner in which the pulp figures and characters are shown, with a sense of silkscreen precision. The focal points of his pieces vary from the use of comic book characters, movie posters, advertisements and symbols are arranged with a sense of spontaneity and a childlike playfulness. Additionally, even though pieces like those in his Collage Girls series and his Girl Pictures series include nudity, they are largely not sexualized. In some cases the representations of sexuality have been covered over by random imagery- in some cases blatantly censoring them. In his, Girl Pictures, the women are reduced to a series of lines and in many cases have another pop image overlapped on them. In these cases, the sexual aspects is very much present- but these women are shown very much like illustrations far away from what would be viewed as a real woman. The sexual aspects are not shocking, they show how even sex has become a pop culture commodity amongst the modern media.

Work like John De La O’s reflects the very nature of modern society, which is a literal explosion of inescapable images. For artists like John, they respond to this prevalence of imagery and popular culture in their art. He examines his surrounding urban environment, and he takes what would be dismissed as banal, impersonal and inconsequential and makes it into personalized works of art.

Rogue Space | Chelsea, NY
Jessica Pepper
Art Historian