Dog and Cat Show 2011

This is a painting going to Skinner/Howard Contemporary Art in Sacramento for their annual dog and cat benefit show. Should be fun. Drop by if you;re in the area.

Studio Redo

My studio's have always been in big warehouse spaces, but Since Heather and I moved to Sacramento and bought a house I've been painting out of the detached 2 car garage. Well we finally decided to get rid of that ugly garage door and wall it off. I can use more wall space and having french doors will let more light in. So just when I was gearing up to create some new work, it'll have to be on hold for a while till the work is done. Will post photos of the progress.

While I'm taking a break, I'll be shooting some short videos of artists I know. Will post them too!

"Halo-Halo: Bay Area Artists of the Filipino Diaspora."

I have been invited to participate in a group exhibition of FIlipino-American artists at the University of Hawaii, Hilo. Sounds like it's going to be a great show curated by Jenifer Wofford. Updates to come!!

I have 2 paintings in the traveling exhibition, "Infinate Mirror," opened in New Hampshire on Sept. 2 at the Thrrone-Sagendorph Art Gallery at Keene State College.

Art in the Streets

Was in Los Angeles to see my son in a play and was able to catch the show at LAMOCA called Art in the Streets. It was an amazing survey of graffiti art from past to present. Here are some photos on Facebook.

Article - from the Curve

Illiterate Gallert T-Shirts

Got some t-shirts from Illiterate Gallery in Denver. There is Coco modeling for me. They turned out great. Makes me want to do my own run. Hmmmm. Stay tuned!

Off to Denver

Finally got the work packed so it's off to Denver tomorrow via FedEx. The drawing is called TayZr. Acrylic on paper.

Illiterate Gallery Pieces

Man, It's been a while since I've posted anything here. I'm in a show in Denver at Illiterate Gallery next month with some cool artists. Here are some piece that I'll be sending.

Video finally up and running!

SquareCylinder is a website created by writer David Roth which focuses on Northern California art. David, who has reviewed a couple shows in Art, Ltd. and his site, approached me to produce a video and it's finally here.

North Carolina artist, Patrick Dougherty came to Palo Alto to create a sculpture at the Palo Alto Art Center in January 2011. Check it out!

Gottfried Helnwein in the house

I was at the Crocker Art Museum last week to shoot 2 short videos of Austrian artist Gottfried Helnwein discussing his work. The dude looks like he should be in a rock and roll band. very nice guy! the videos will be playing on monitors for visitors.

An afternoon with artist Patrick Dougherty

I was in Palo Alto this past weekend with Heather to shoot some video of artist Patrick Dougherty at the Palo Alto Art Center. SquareCylinder founder and writer David Roth was there to interview Patrick. David's website is a portal for reviews of Northern California art. Check it out and also Patrick's site. Once the video is completed, I'll post the link from SquareCylinder.

Review of my show at Jack Fischer Gallery in Art, Ltd. Magazine

Thanks to DeWitt Cheng for writing this review of my show at Jack Fischer Gallery in SF.

John Yoyogi Fortes: "Parallel Boondocks" at Jack Fischer Gallery
by dewitt cheng
Jan 2011

It Sounded A Lot Better Before I Said It
2010
John Yoyogi Fortes
Acrylic, enamel and collage on canvas
12" x 9"
Photo: courtesy Jack Fischer Gallery

Eclecticism and hybridity may be common practice these days, but who would have thought that graffiti art, pop surrealism, and identity art (loosely defined) could combine as exuberantly as they do in John Yoyogi Fortes' paintings? Like his postcolonial colleagues Enrique Chagoya and Manuel Ocampo, Fortes employs cultural mash-ups to put a humorous and absurd face on the darker truths of imperialist history: his 2002 Triton Museum show, "Awakening the Sleeping Monkey," dealt with the 1904 exhibition of 1200 captured (aka liberated) Filipinos, at the St. Louis World's Fair, as cannibals. Fortes has also, however, explored how family, memory and identity persist or change in the tumultuous modern world. In "Parallel Boondocks," he continues mining lowbrow/comic imagery from newly met East and West for insights into the funhouse of modern consciousness. Fortes: "It's between the materials and me. It's about aligning that inner space where ideas flow freely and reveling in that moment where actions transcend language." The resultant paintings, with their layers of images and ricocheting meanings, are "map[s] to various levels of consciousness."

These maps are complex and ambiguous. Runt, a large diptych, combines beige, red and gray patches and swatches, some brushy and diffuse, others defined by hard edges, straight or scalloped, with loops, stripes, patterning and writing (manchica, or blot), and a bizarre cast of "actors": a naked, blob-headed muscleman posing atop a pedestal lying between female legs; a wooden duck"s head, bearing a bird photo in its eye and sporting a brick-patterned frying-pan hat; a snake-necked woman's head emerging from an ovoid picture frame; and a cartoon dog head, scowling, with its eyes transformed into probing bloodshot pseudopods. Cartoon animals reappear in the non-rectangular diptych, Repetition, Redemption, Relapse, joined by figure studies reminiscent of David Salle's, but collaged here rather than painted. Smaller works (Art is Evil, Punk, It Sounded a Lot Better Before I Said It) function as funny (in both senses) cartoon portraits reminiscent of Jim Nutt and Roy De Forest.

Happy Holiday!

Well the show in SF has been down for a while and the paint can lids that remain are going out to those in need of some holiday cheer. Let's kick ass this coming year! Be safe during the holiday!
Best to all of you!
John

Huh!

Nice photo! Do I really need to change my name now to Forts?

Opening Reception for Parallel Boondocks

Here is a link to Artbusiness.com. Alan was there taking photos at the opening.

Review a Squarecylinder

David Roth wrote this review of my show at Jack Fischer Gallery in SF on SQUARECYLINDER.COM

. I hear there are two others out there. We'll see if they actually manifest. Will post them as soon as I know.

Thanks David!

John Yoyogi Fortes @ Jack Fischer

Posted on 16 November 2010
Tags: David M. Roth,

"Runt", 2010, mixed media on canvas, 120" x 84" (diptych)

John Yoyogi Fortes isn’t a street artist but he paints like one – one who’s especially well-versed in American and European Expressionism. His specialty is the urban fever dream, a realm in which subconscious fears and desires play out against backdrops of crumbling paint-spattered walls. It’s brightly hued and richly textured world into which the artist inserts comic- and graffiti-influenced characters that are in psychic pain. They appear — along with forms that are collaged, sprayed, and hand-painted — in colliding planes that rest on layers of scraped paint that recall surfaces where concert posters are continuously stripped and re-stapled.

Fortes creates an electrically charged, claustrophobic atmosphere filled with high-def images and stupefying excess, where little makes sense and everything seems wrapped in a cocoon of white noise. Thus, in Fortes, fans Francis Bacon, Manuel Ocampo, Sue Coe and others of an expressionist bent will find a kindred spirit – one who’s also absorbed the influences of underground comic artists like Robert Crumb, Ed “Big Daddy” Rothand the whole freak-show milieu of RAW Vision, the journal of outsider art.

"Untitled", 2010, acrylic, enamel and collage on canvas, 50" x 40"

Runt, the largest (120 x 84”) painting on view, is typical of the artist’s output over the past few years. Out of a ground of geometric swatches laced with vertical stains and loose spray-painted lines, faces and figures appear like apparitions. Some are vividly rendered; others seem vaporous, as if summoned by a darkroom trickster in an early 20^th century “spirit photograph”. The painting’s most prominent feature is a trio of elongated eyeballs that hang by tentacles from a mask in the manner of Roth’s “Rat Fink” character — an expression of extreme cartooning and, perhaps, a pointed reference to the ubiquity of the surveillance camera. I say perhaps, because Fortes’ works rarely make direct statements about anything; they take an allegorical stance, but their allusions are wide-open.

Where in the past Fortes’ work pointedly referred to issues of race, identity, sexuality and global politics, the paintings here seem less driven by conscious intentions than by an urge to allow his arsenal of self-invented characters and appropriated images to interact freely. Like many of the Lowbrow/Pop Surrealist artists with whom he feels an affinity, Fortes tends to back away from overt proscriptions, preferring instead to play hot potato with live ammunition to see what ignites.

"It Sounded a Lot Better Before I Said It", 2010, acrylic, enamel and collage on canvas, 12" x 9"

Untitled, a portrait of an urban hipster, is cheerfully apocalyptic. Sprouting from its Picasso-influenced face is a thought balloon filled with red splotches of blood. Below the face, which rests on a pedestal, is a severed hand onto which spills more blood. It Sounded A Lot Better Before I Said It features a boxy figure. Its heart is exposed, and one of its severed limbs sports a swastika-like crest. Both are fine examples of how Fortes projects terror into a comic format.

In this exhibition, he fills much of the gallery with small works, many of which seem small-bore when compared to his more expansive, wall-sized excursions. A reoccurring motif these small paintings is a cigarette-smoking primate whose picaninnyvisage appears most memorably on Smoking Monkeys, a series of 18 wall-mounted paint can lids. This racist caricature should shock, but when pulled out of context, as it is here, it loses power. To understand why, look at a prior work like Immaculate Rendition (2008), where Fortes used a similar image to devastating effect, and you see that as an abstract painter with narrative inclinations – however abstruse — Fortes only hits full stride when he has a big canvas.

–DAVID M. ROTH

John Yoyogi Fortes: Parallel Boondocks @ Jack Fischer through Dec. 4, 2010

To learn more about John Yoyogi Fortes watch the video of him creating Immaculate Rendition.

Installed the Work

Drove to SF today in sunny weather. Much nicer than the day the art movers came! Jack and I installed all the work and to see Runt on the wall was very cool. If you're in the city I hope you'll stop in to see the exhibit. It'll be up till Dec. 4.

Paintings Headed for NY

The art shipper came today, in the rain and wind, to pick up two paintings for the traveling exhibit Infinite Mirror. First stop Syracuse, N.Y. I was the last stop and it was a packed truck as you can see by the photo. Coco even made the shippers see the art in her room.

Paintings in Progress

I should be finishing the paintings that I've already started, but I got into this one and will show it next week in SF. The top and bottom are different sizes so there is about a 3 to 4 inch difference on the left. The top is panel and the bottom is canvas. Still in progress.

This is also in progress, but should be finished by the weekend.

Goin to Jack Fischer's

These are 2 completed paintings that I just finished. Both are 40 x 50 inches. Acrylic on canvas.