By K.A. Letts

 

What’s an artist to do when he loses faith in himself and in his chosen medium? Jason Revok claims to have spent the past ten years wrestling with this existential question. In that time, he has refashioned his identity as a well-known L.A. graffiti writer into that of an artist in good standing with the elite world of fine art. The results of his reported wanderings and questionings are on display now in his solo exhibition “Jason Revok: The Artist’s Instruments” at the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit (MOCAD).

        Born in Riverside California in 1977, Revok grew up suburban and working class. Art, he says, consisted of “album covers, skateboard graphics and comic books.” He discovered, and then embraced, the outlaw life of a successful graffiti artist, stealing paint from the hardware store, getting a rush of adrenaline from his unauthorized activities—and occasionally getting caught. But by 2009, the tagger reports feeling alienated and bored as he began to question the social pathologies associated with his chosen lifestyle. He explains, “I had designed my life over the years in a way where I could prioritize painting graffiti all the time. For years and years, I was basically a full-time career criminal, and as a result, I was getting exhausted with all of the stress and anxiety, not to mention the constant legal drama.” In 2010, he spent two months in jail for his illegal graffiti writing.

 

        In his carefully curated autobiographical narrative, Jason Revok claims to have moved, in a more or less orderly way, from outlaw tagger into the art mainstream. The truth, as it emerges, is a little more complicated than that. Reliable rumor has it that he continues to write graffiti even as he has developed an art practice that features more gallery-friendly artworks. His upstanding public identity as a fine artist co-exists with his continued activity as an unrepentant graffiti writer still operating in the shadows.

 

Jason Revok, AI_04X3_10/22, A,B,C. Oil enamel and synthetic polymer on wood, mounted on steel frame, (Installation view). Photo: Samantha Bankle. Courtesy the artist, MOCAD, and Olu & Company.

 

        When Revok fled L.A., post-incarceration, to pre-bankruptcy Detroit in 2011, he found a beleaguered city more open to street artists than most, with plenty of vacant buildings and a more-or-less welcoming populace. Like many native Motown artists, he was drawn to the abundance of raw materials that could be salvaged for his nascent studio practice. “My scavenged materials were from homes, businesses, churches and schools that had been abandoned. The exteriors of these buildings revealed stories of what was and still is happening there, like the skin of the body of Detroit,” he explained. The resulting body of work, which was shown in his solo exhibition “Ordinary Things” at the Library Street Collective in 2012, made use of the battered integrity of local detritus to create a promising series of exuberant geometric collages. Colorful, with juicy patterns and recognizably “street” materials, the work had a kind of wild energy that merged the renegade spirit of graffiti art with a refined sensibility at home in the gallery. In the current show at Mocad, heavy wood constructs created in this way, AI_04X3_10/22 A,B and C, are new iterations of this highly decorative and slickly finished assemblage.

        Revok continues to use spray paint along with more conventional acrylics in his studio practice but began to work with lighter substrates in 2016. His experiments in working with home-made instruments, particularly improvised, single-use rastrums—think of the old-timey tool for drawing lines that music teachers used to draw staves on blackboards back in the day—result in parallel striped compositions moving wavily across stretched canvas in various patterns. This is Revok’s self-professed strategy for subverting the painterly gesture of his graffiti style while preserving the physicality of making marks. Several artworks produced by this method, such as K_Loop_XL_FlourRed_Blu_FlourYl_8/22, are on display in the “The Artist’s Instruments.” They are optically active, minimalist canvases, elegant and impressive in scale, but ultimately corporate, impersonal. They hang, humming on the darkened walls of the gallery, but no tune emerges.

 

        Similarly mute are the three artworks entitled Selfportrait_A, B, C_2/21_9/22. Their thinly tinted colors are beautifully luminous, and the wrinkles and tears in the rough drop cloths—which are attached to painted and stretched canvas—add a pleasing physicality. Self-portraits are often the most personally intimate works an artist produces, but these formally exquisite paintings instead seem to be acts of self-censorship. His choice of title “depersonalization-derealization” for a 2019 exhibition featuring similar works, is telling. Clearly, he is hiding something.

        Revok finally begins to reveal himself in the dark interior of a delivery truck parked in the gallery. In it, we find a video of the artist engaged in making his spirograph paintings, arguably the most personal, though still recessive, work in “The Artist’s Instruments.” Once again, it is a kind of mesmerizing choreography in the body of the artist as he creates, and we begin to see a ritualistic process at work while patterns emerge. A dozen of the smaller paintings hang in rows of six, one row on top of the other; we observe as they begin to glow and pulse. Some are incandescent on a black background, while others float against a rosy sky. There is a kind of transcendence here that almost justifies Revok’s refusal of the personal gesture. Almost.

 

        In “The Artist’s Instruments,” Jason Revok has managed to keep his telltale fingerprints off the art, but perhaps he has succeeded too well. He has come up with a durable—and I’m sure, marketable—art practice, but the work is altogether too buttoned up. Now that he has learned to color within the lines, he will need to integrate the opposing impulses that coexist within him, to merge the appetite for risk and transgression of the street with the formal elegance and craft of his studio practice.

_{K.A. Letts is the Detroit editor of the New Art Examiner, a working artist (kalettsart.com) and art blogger (rustbeltarts.com). She has shown her paintings and drawings in galleries and museums in Toledo, Detroit, Chicago, and New York. She writes frequently about art in the Detroit area.}

Additional Works by Jason Revok