Painting paranoia, LA style

If I ever get stuck at a dinner party with a deranged pizza-gate enthusiast, a 9/11 truther or someone concerned that the US government are funding transgender mice, I’m going to say, “Babes, don’t get me wrong, I love your paranoid style, but could you please give it a rest and pass me the salt?”

The Paranoid Style in American Politics was an influential essay by the historian Richard Hofstadter, published in Harper’s magazine over 60 years ago, but which wouldn’t look out of place in the current issue. It also forms the title and inspiration for a group show of four LA-based artists that just opened at Josh Lilley Gallery in London. The exhibition “explores the socio-analytical potential of art in a post-truth, hyper-individualist society, revealing the consequential subversion of absolutism from both the left and right.” Yikes! But what is paranoid style?

I read the essay on the bus the other morning. I’ll need to give it another go to ingest all the info, but my main takeaway was that throughout American history – and history in general – politicians have often incited a fear of some intangible, unknown, hidden enemy in order to sway the voting public. Freemasons, Communists and the Illuminati have all featured as that shadowy enemy. And it’s neither a purely right nor left-wing thing. Today’s political battle lines have their own shadowy enemies: whether it be DEI Marxists or shady Russian spies.

LA and the Paranoid style seem like a perfect match: this is the city that birthed both the Hollywood dream factory and the nightmare of Charles Manson and his followers (currently the subject of a new Netflix doc called Chaos: “Explore a conspiracy of mind control, CIA experiments and murder”). It’s also the city of Paul McCarthy and his ketchup splattered video sets, the cool detachment of Alex Israel’s sunglasses, and the stomping ground of Bret Easton Ellis.

But what is LA and its art scene like for a new generation? “Los Angeles feels like a cluster of small towns,” Jacob Fenton, one of the four artists exhibiting in the Josh Lilley show, tells me. “Everyone knows everyone and the degree of separation between circles is small.” Sound familiar? Fenton’s paintings are about “overexposure”, his imagery culled from secondary sources: James Cameron’s footage of the Titanic shipwreck, a still of Kevin Costner from the film JFK. They radiate a kind of LED-infused, masculine energy, suggestive of an insomniac’s long nights killing time on his computer screen. A recent painting titled what is that? what the fuck is that? features Sergeant Hartman from Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket, pointing a stern finger toward the viewer. He’s the character famous for screaming at all the young GI recruits: “the first and last words out of your filthy sewers will be ‘Sir’, do you maggots understand that!?” Fenton says his subject matter is “a sample of what I see as major underlying influences on the American psyche that have become especially banal or trivial through their long-standing popularity and recycled visibility”. His works also look literally overexposed: if I had a TV remote handy I’d have pointed it at the paintings and tried to adjust the brightness. This was the artist’s first time in London, and some of his family and friends were also in town. They’d been to the National Gallery earlier in the day, had managed to get a rare table at St John and planned to catch Final Hot Desert’s opening the following evening. Over in LA he says everyone needs a car to get around, “but the privacy allows you distance and the option to disappear.”

Another artist in the show, Nehemiah Cisneros has never driven in his life. “I kept getting arrested for graffiti as a teenager and the judicial system kept pushing my qualifying year to get a driver’s license back”. Instead, Cisneros hitched a ride with friends. He also takes the metro, which, contrary to popular belief, is actually “way more efficient now.”

Four of his hilarious, rowdy, Rabelaisian paintings are on display in the show. His works are like maximalist collages full of cultural references: 1970s Blacksploitation movies, Japanese manga, Surrealism and classical paintings all blend together to create new narratives, what the artist calls “neighbourhood fairy tales”. In a piece called exodus, The Raft of the Medusa is relocated to a coastal storm near an American funfair. The male subjects (based on characters from 70s movies such as Dolemite, as well as Luke Cage, the first Black superhero) cling onto floating arcade machines as they try to stay above water, meanwhile a mermaid with a bird’s face nonchalantly scrolls through her iPhone. Cisneros describes his painting style as if “Boyz N The Hood met Lord of The Rings.” He’s not wrong – he also has an affinity with British folk horror, counting The Wicker Man as a favourite. I asked the artist if he had any gallery recommendations for anyone visiting LA. He suggested Good Mother, which has just moved to a new location in the city’s West Adams district. “They recently had a stunning group exhibition based on artists whose practices are rooted in creating work with machines. It featured the UCLA MFA alumnus Chris Velez; if you want to see what an iPhone looks like if it could grow hair, I recommend checking out his work.”

Artist Salim Green often bikes around the city’s art scene, and recommends the emerging gallery Bellyman, as well as Francois Ghebaly (their most recent exhibition was a solo show of filthy felt-tip drawings by the legendary underground filmmaker Mike Kuchar). Here in the ‘Paranoid Style’ exhibition, Green is showing six small abstract paintings plus a Super 8 film made in collaboration with Nax Steel, titled Nax Steel’s Halloween. It has the feel of home movie footage, except with a focus on guns: a man’s voice (the artist’s uncle) in the narration explains that “I keep this one on me and I keep this one in the car.” We see scenes of lush Florida greenery, mixed with a shooting range, the narrator recommending a particular type of high quality bullet where “you won’t get all that dirt.” For a British audience, it’s probably a bit weird to see gun culture shown in such a normalised, domestic way, especially given how much death and destruction it can cause.

Speaking of destruction, I couldn’t talk to the artists about LA and not ask about the fires. “The fires have rearranged the lives of so many in the city within and outside of the art community,” Green explained. “The devastation is widespread. I urge all reading to get involved in the aid and rebuilding efforts.” Jacob Fenton bemoaned the fact that “developers have their dream scenario of owners desperate to sell essentially entire neighborhoods, the direction of which will influence the trends and nature of neighborhoods to come.” And in true paranoid style, CBS have listed some of the conspiracy theories circulating online: these range from the government using “microwave systems to ignite fires” to a TikTok “celebrity crime cover-up conspiracy” involving Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs’ mansion… even though it didn’t burn. And yet, amongst all this bad news and devastation, Cisneros still remains optimistic for the future. He says artists are already using art to make sense of the tragedy of the fires: “Los Angeles has a new shared lived experience that will translate into monumental work going forward.”