DAVID PALMER: A FOREST OF SIGNS
by Peter Frank

With so many contemporary inheritors of Pop Art choosing to consign themselves uncritically to vernacular modalities, it comes as something of a shock to behold artwork that embraces the vernacular without becoming part of it. Maintaining the same contemplative near-distance that the original Pop artists did from the formal idioms and referential motifs of our everyday lives, David Palmer allows himself to muse upon the condition(s) of informational dissonance and overload that have only multiplied, exponentially, since Pop’s heyday and – perhaps defiantly – to compose visual coherencies out of those myriad idioms and motifs. Indeed, Palmer straddles not only the (dotted) line between the known and the invented, but the one between the visual and the conceptual – between what Duchamp called the “retinal” and what the artists (and theorists) he influenced call the “signal.” The pleasures are those of the spectacle, but the spectacle jazzes both eyeball and cerebrum.

In his latest series, “Walkabout,” Palmer makes his approach that much more graspable. He relies as his conceptual touchstone on a cipher readily recognizable to anyone who spends much time on urban streets. The stylized, faceless figuroid frozen into a position of determined forward motion – nominally male, but genderless by usage – bespeaks the presence of the pedestrian amidst automobile traffic, cautioning traffic to provide right of way or beckoning to actual humans waiting to cross the street. Palmer plants this cipher – a meme for us and for himself – in the center of each painting, satisfying the egoistic need of all viewers to orient the world around us. Thus implicitly privileging our gaze with one of contemporary civilization’s truly universal ideograms, Palmer weaves a cacophony of shapes around and through this central shape – not all of them silhouettes, but all of them refined into a simplicity adequate for blending them into a greater whole.

The shapes that envelope and penetrate the walking everyman come from the same parallel world of para-linguistic signifiers as the “man” itself. And in his non-“Walkabout” paintings (and in painting-like jigsaw assemblages the artist has fabricated out of linoleum) Palmer allows these forms their own turn as protagonists. Elephants, plants, the head of Abraham Lincoln, speech balloons from comic strips, decorative pinwheels and wavy lines and arabesques, all these images cluster and clamor, overlap and interweave into a visual approximation of the informational din that now enmeshes our daily lives, actually and virtually.

Palmer’s message may lie in what he says about contemporary life being info-fraught (and, by inference, substance-deficient). But his artistry lies in how he makes such info-intensiveness seem to make sense. Almost unable to help himself, Palmer – not so long ago a figure painter adept at conjuring a sunny, suburban sort of surrealism, a kind of Twilight-Zone Edward Hopper – needs to render his elements lucidly and compose them elegantly. Would that all the undigested knowledge and banal information that buzzes through Palmer’s pictures actually buzzed through our lives with such grace and articulation!

But we have become inured to the babble that engulfs us; the younger we are, in fact, the more we are able to surf our sea of signals – and the more dependent we are on that sea to bear us along. By clarifying that sea, by separating it, however temporarily and artificially, into its myriad components, Palmer re-focuses us on the sum of its parts and makes us that much more acutely aware of its ubiquitous presence and spectacular chaos. In making all that seem so attractive and exhilarating, of course, Palmer sends mixed messages; we cannot with any certainty read his work as condemnatory. But he is not simply exploiting our addiction, either; like Rosenquist, Lichtenstein, and others over the past half-century who have painted the visual racket of a consumer society, Palmer manifests not so much a love-hate relationship with the modern condition of image assault as an awe at its immensity and the thoroughness of its presence in our consciousness. If you can’t beat it, David Palmer muses, read it; after all, you’ve already joined it.

Los Angeles
April 2011

PETER FRANK is art critic for the Huffington Post, Associate Editor of Fabrik magazine, and Adjunct Senior Curator at the Riverside Art Museum. He is former editor of Visions Art Quarterly and THEmagazine Los Angeles, and former art critic at the LA Weekly, Angeleno magazine, Village Voice, and SoHo Weekly News. Frank has curated exhibitions throughout North America and Europe and has written numerous books, monographs, and catalogues.