A Brief Look: The Art of Ken Garduno

 

 

Los Angeles-based artist Ken Garduno has a broad catalog of shifting styles — from the fauvist bent of ‘The Dividing Line‘ to the clean realism of ‘Crowded,’ whose color palette gives away an expressionist’s touch. Garduno excels at finding the raw and profane elements of the human form. His figures, constructed of rough-colored rubs — charcoal, ink, paint. Garduno makes his markings felt.

Garduno takes the role of artist on at its core — his paintings are ideas, thoughts, emotions. His tools are not used to make them pretty, but to express them fully, with an honest voice. Follow him on social media and you will find an artist in constant motion, creating figures and landscapes at a pace that displays a restlessness, an eagerness, to always reveal something new to the world. When he does take on those figures in the pop culture, his Batman becomes a cubist nightmare — as tortured on the surface as he is on the inside.

There’s an external excitement on his canvases, each seemingly erratic brush stroke builds on the last, becoming a prisma-saturated collage of ideas. Garduno is a wild experimenter who avoids the common tropes of the current world of modern art. His approach is oddly classic, there are various schools and movements in his work, yet through his hand these ideas are newborn.