Welcome to Sub/Plus is like a show of postcards from a different reality. Forsaking his usual grid-based structures, Joey Like divides his attention between floating/drifting jewel forms ...
and forms with lattice-lace growth patterns...
According to the artist's playful science-fictiony backstory, his paintings depict a world where jewels and crystals float in the sky. Particulate rain from these crystal clouds falls to earth, providing food for living structures that combine fungus with coral. Like's snapshots of this world make the viewer want more. What else could be on this strange planet?
Sometimes these chrystalline skies seem candy colored. Other times they seem misty, or sun-drenched or more heavy, loaded with primary colors...
Other paintings by Like focus on the life forms on the ground below the crystalline clouds ...
These gossamer life forms, while seemingly stout and strong, are lace-like and textured with round forms that can only be seen on close examination...
These marks look like cellular forms under a microscope.
My favorite painting in Joey Like's show comes off almost as a delightful joke. Joey's work always seems cool and rational, far from expressionistic, but Joey gives us a hint that surface appearances may be deceptive with this painting...
Does it look familiar?
By appearing to quote the uber expressionist, Like creates a marvelous painting while reminding us that each painter works by sets of rules of one kind or another, as if playing a self created game, and each painting is an act of self-expression. It's as though the artist is saying "I may be a lot Bauhaus, but I'm Van Gogh too..."
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