Charlie James Gallery is pleased to present Luke Butler: Color Pictures, the artist’s third solo exhibition with the gallery. San Francisco-based Butler draws inspiration from pop culture and the history of film and television in luscious, evocative paintings that invite the viewer into imagined cinematic worlds. By transforming images from his lived experience – natural and urban landscapes, objects saved or remembered – into paintings heavy with narrative potential, Butler plays with the tension between reality and artifice that is inherent to film. These invented bits of pop cultural history feel as if they have always existed, as if we should know what comes next. But however potently Butler’s Color Pictures suggest action, they never reveal it, standing continually on the precipice of narrative. The Color Pictures series takes its form from the openings of 1960s movies and TV, which triumphantly declared their evolution from black and white into color. Butler consumed these in syndication as a child, long after color became the norm, rendering this declaration as something outside of time and therefore ripe for examination. Butler treats the text almost as a figure in the landscape, existing object-like amid the drama about to unfold. These works build upon a previous series of paintings that played with the tragicomic existential tension of end cards, endlessly proclaiming The End. The Color Picture series instead offers a beginning, or many beginnings. Set against images of the great American landscape or the architectural jumble of urban life, these works serve as an invitation to narrative, offering the viewer a feeling of infinite possibility. The Location paintings build upon this cinematic theme, each declaring its time and place like so many title cards or script directions. Enigmatic Los Angeles alleyways and the humbler New York City skylines serve as containers for Butler’s atmospheric scene-setting, bounded within painted borders that emphasize their cinematic quality. As with the Color Pictures, these works come from photographs taken by the artist but trade in the crispness of photography for much a looser hand. The softness of Butler’s landscapes recalls the vast painted worlds of classic Hollywood backdrops or the hazy glow of memory. The source images Butler is drawn to often embody a sense of drama – low sun hitting a towering cliffside, restless sea meeting a rocky coastline – that is in keeping with the cinematic overtones of the paintings. He expands his sensual scope in two symphony paintings, which introduce the idea of music into the work, conjuring movie scores and concert halls via crashing waves and floating flowers. Butler’s confident hand captures a distinct sense of arrested motion, his musical references emphasizing the feeling of catching just a single frame of a film strip speeding by or a dance frozen mid-step. The exhibition also includes a suite of watercolors of Star Wars action figure packaging, painted to scale. A lover of genre film and television from childhood, the roots of Butler’s artistic consciousness lie in the graphics of pop culture. He lovingly captures not only the iconic Star Wars design, but the wear and tear that comes with enthusiastic use. Each crinkled corner and torn edge speaks to life lived. A rectangle of solid color, framed by exposed cardboard, emphasizes the absence of the figure itself. As with the paintings, these works suggest grand narratives unfolding just off-screen, so to speak, whether in a film about to begin or an action figure reenactment playing out nearby. Luke Butler (b.1971, San Francisco, CA) has an MFA from California College of the Arts and a BFA from The Cooper Union. His work is in the permanent collections of the de Young Museum, San Francisco; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Berkeley Art Museum; Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento, CA; Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, AK; Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego; and Norton Museum of Art, West Palm Beach, FL. His work has been included in group exhibitions at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive; The FLAG Art Foundation, NY; Minnesota Street Project, San Francisco; Orange County Museum of Art, CA; and Crystal Bridges Museum, among others. His next solo show, "Color Pictures," will be at Charlie James Gallery, Los Angeles, November 2nd- December 7th, 2024. Butler lives and works in San Francisco. He is represented by Jessica Silverman, San Francisco. ____ “One might prudently reconsider attending Alexander Reben's latest foray into algorithmic aesthetics at the Charlie James Gallery, where the incessant cacophony of synthetic semiotics risks diluting the very essence of avant-garde ingenuity. Reben's ostensibly groundbreaking AI constructs, while pushing the boundaries of post-human expressionism, inadvertently succumb to a labyrinthine opacity that obfuscates any semblance of genuine emotional resonance. The exhibition, rather than serving as a palimpsest of innovative discourse, devolves into a simulacrum of mechanized profundity, rendering the spectator's engagement a Sisyphean endeavor. In an era where authenticity in artistic praxis is paramount, Reben's digital reveries may ultimately leave the connoisseur yearning for a more substantively corporeal dialogue.” – ChatGPT Charlie James Gallery is pleased to present Write a convoluted exhibition title for Alexander Reben's show in the basement of the Charlie James Gallery, an exhibition of works by the conceptual artist and MIT-trained roboticist Alexander Reben, who utilizes artificial intelligence to create artworks that spring from the interface between human and machine. Reben’s open-hearted approach to technology allows space for both wonder and humor. His works take a wide array of forms, ranging from large, machine-made metal sculptures to an ongoing series of ChatGPT-generated self-critical texts that playfully skewer the language of stereotypical artspeak. Elsewhere, Reben incorporates viewer input into continually evolving artworks that represent a collaboration between artist, viewer, and algorithm. The centerpiece of the exhibition is the large wall-based sculpture AI and the Anvil, in which small, intricate waves ripple across a vast metal surface. With this work, Reben explores the realm of directly converting language into tangible sculpture. Using the giant metal-forming robots of Machina Labs, Reben iteratively collaborates with an AI that autonomously generates code that creates generative 3D sculptures as instructions for massive robotic systems. This enables the robots to sculpt sheet metal into artworks with remarkable precision in a way impossible with other fabrication methods. Reben describes the performative nature of the sculpture’s making as akin to a high-pressure tango, where each machine must move in precisely the opposite direction of the other to balance the immense forces required to manipulate metal. This poetic movement not only reflects the intricacies of their physical interaction but also embodies the delicate dance of creation itself. Other works incorporate prompts in real time, transforming input from exhibition visitors into AI-generated images and text. Speak Art Into Life invites viewers to suggest ideas to a microphone, which AI converts into visual outputs that become exquisite corpse-style collaborative images. The images evolve over the course of the exhibition, growing and expanding in unpredictable ways. The use of four classic analog flap displays emphasizes the near-uncanny newness of the cutting edge tech that powers the work. By operating on the leading edge of what technology allows, Reben invites us to imagine possible futures for our relationship to machines, making room for a sense of play and even beauty in the boundaries between language and code. Alexander Reben is an artist who has spent over a decade creating work that probes the inherently human nature of the artificial. With his start at MIT Media Lab, Reben has long studied human-robot symbiosis and art, using experimentation and prototyping to delve into our intricate relationships with algorithms, automation, and amplification. Through the lenses of absurdity, humor, and mischief, his artwork highlights our inseparable evolutionary entanglement with the technology that shapes our existence. Reben has become a leading figure at the intersection of art and technology. He was OpenAI’s first Artist in Residence, and his first solo museum retrospective, “AI Am I?”, which included an exhibition of over 120 artworks, recently concluded at the Crocker Art Museum. His work has been exhibited globally at institutions including Ars Electronica, MAK Contemporary Art Museum, Vitra Design Museum, Design Museum Ghent, and the Vienna Biennale. As an expert in his field, he has lectured at TED, SXSW, TTI Vanguard, Google, UC Berkeley, SMFA, CCA, MIT, and Harvard. Reben’s work has been covered by CNN, NPR, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Washington Post, Fast Company, Filmmaker Magazine, New Scientist, BBC, PBS, Discovery Channel, Cool Hunting, MIT Technology Review and WIRED, among others.