Daniel Arango VS. Kevin Arnold: Faith as Model

About

 Extremely different in their approaches to the language of painting, each artist offers a unique perspective on 

          what painting might be like when not participating in the current trend of copycat mediocrity and mechanical art, 

          a.k.a. “zombie formalism,” a term coined by Walter Robinson. Neither Arango and Arnold are interested in

          commenting on the history of painting nor being categorized in the art business. Instead, both have been following

          their own bliss in a world full of reductive and abstract paintings. 

          Daniel Arango draws obsessively in AutoCAD and prints his artworks on paper in a cereal box format. These

          images on cereal boxes draw upon the icons of the popular world, such as James Franco, Lady Gaga, Justin

          Bieber, Miley Cyrus, and Mother Teresa. He has embarked on a spiritual quest since 2010 by traveling all over 

          the world carrying a cereal box with him. Arango treats the box as a pseudo-religious object, and he performs 

          as he eats and shares the cereal with strangers. 

          Working from life rather than photos, Kevin Arnold updates and harnesses a vocabulary of Trompe-l'œil. By 

          choosing to paint objects with no immediate aesthetic value, he tricks us about  the distance between the day-

          to-day existence and our awareness by abstracting the represented reality. He employs the physical scale in oil

          painting as an original commodity as intended and plays with the shapes of the canvas, colors of the shadows,

          textures of the surface in oil paint.