So what does good art do in 2016 that is different from the time of the Renaissance. Satan took his revenge then more than now, killing the artists, and everybody else, at a very young age. If you take it cum grano salis, simply following your good sense, you might say ‘a lot,’ and yet there is no change in the dreamlike essence of art. Think of Piero della Francesca painted eyes looking into eternity, almost extracting their bodies from earthly, painful struggles for survival. Good artists know perfectly that names and images and facts are masks of inner uncertainties, like stickers we peel from the refrigerator. We still don’t remember what’s inside.The point is our presence in the landscape: and Jeffrey Vallance is the wizard artist showing our uncomfortable loss of power once our ordinary self confidence goes to hell. Satan’s most subtle intrusion. What happens then? There is no more separation between our animal self and the tentacular temptations of a rationalized landscape reducing to dead meat our hopes and desires.

An artist known for drawing from a wide array of media that brings together both painting and performance, Vallance's latest exhibition takes on the election, among other subjects, in collages that feature political placards along with the artist's expressive drawings. These are visceral assemblages that wryly comment on the nature of beauraucracy, corruption, politics, and society-- in ways that are way more fun than CNN. 

I was out gallery-hopping along La Cienega Blvd. one sunny day just before the election, and walked into Edward Cella's gallery. It was the end of the previous show. There were drawings leaning against the wall in the reception area that I recognized as Jeffrey Vallance's work, and inquired about one of the smaller ones (which later sold at the opening unfortunately). The Registrar, Sarah, and her gallery-mate John, were very open, enthusiastic about the show coming up. Later Mr. Cella came out and greeted me warmly - we had just met. To (perhaps) repeat an abused term, I immediately realized the uniquely casual atmosphere in the gallery reflected the artist’s ‘temperament’. Jeffrey’s work has always intrigued me because of the wide variety of media used, his relationship to his personal experiences, how he finds himself in unusual situations, to be absorbed, utilized, responded to. After a brief how-do-you-do at the opening I left him to his own devices, as he is engaging and conversational, anything but aloof to the attention paid to him in public. 

Three big names ran for president this year, but the one you didn’t see on your ballot was that of artist Jeffrey Vallance. While Trump and Clinton were duking it out, Vallance ran his own mock campaign of sorts — building a platform based on vintage campaign slogans, automatic writing and symbols that have reoccurred throughout his decades-long career as one of Los Angeles’ most provocative and pioneering artists. Known as an infiltration artist and something of a professional prankster, Vallance has made a name for himself by investigating and inserting himself into institutional processes both bureaucratic and arcane.

Jeffrey Vallance was already something of a legend when I first became acquainted with his work – an ‘interventionist’ style of conceptual art in which the performance became a kind of deconstructed cultural inquiry. My first impression came by way of captioned illustrations with accompanying narrative (appearing in the L.A. Weekly), a kind of anthropological scrapbook replete with schematic drawings of quasi-iconic images, national insignia, commercial artifacts, transit documents and correspondence with government bureaucrats.

Jeffrey Vallance has attained something akin to cult status. His work covers a wide range of media and is based on consumer and popular culture, and is ironically critical without being didactic. Vallance never makes fun of his subjects, but rather uses what is around him--be it a store bought chicken, the work of Thomas Kinkade or President Richard Nixon-- to explore how context can shape meaning. 

A confluence of odd bedfellows is the hallmark of Jeffrey Vallance's irreverent approach to art-making, use of materials, his amalgamations of popular culture, religion, tradition, the election, and the whole lot of it. Recently, Vallance has ventured down two divergent paths: the first, a series of works on paper collectively titled Rudis Tractus; the other veering into the realm of social media, which critic Doug Harvey describes in the show's catalogue as a means "to prod and probe the new social boundaries and mechanisms generated by the new technology."