560 2nd St, Oakland
Boasting the works of 32 member artists in a wide range of media and styles, the walls of The Grand Gallery visibly groan with the weight of their teeming pieces. Frames and canvases nearly touch, one hand’s style directly abutting their neighbors’ alternate features. Tucked into the bright right-hand corner of the high-ceilinged space are the cheeky paintings of Brian N. Clarke, aka Les Toil, their subjects, be they human or other, deeply engrossed in the lush and fantastical worlds, seemingly oblivious to the onlooker.
Details of “Turquoise in Blue”
The oils swirl and ebb, leaves in the wind and the smoke of a cigarette, bees in flight and sunset clouds obscuring and revealing. Foliage features heavily in his animal works, the creatures anthropomorphized and too-happy, too-sad, too….saucy? Or, as his instagram reads: “Funny animals painted serious AF. Pinup artist Les Toil occasionally paints different kinds of chicks and foxes. Stay tooned!”
Serious they are. Those weighty clouds? Hovering above a vista, cradling the memory of a rabbit’s mother as that rabbit sits hat in hand, stick and bindle at his side, apparent black eye on his face. What has led him to this moment, this cliffside, this memory? We’ll never know, but perhaps that too is part of the beauty.
Les Toil’s humans and animals alike live in worlds seemingly suspended between childhood dream states and adult vices, their cartoonish natures and soft, welcoming shades cleanly coating the darker nature of the content, and ambiguity is the name of the game throughout their scenes.
Are the women in “Love Paralysis” dressing or undressing? Is the one standing physically disabled, or is that paralysis an emotional one? Are they sisters, lovers, friends? Who between them is the painter, with their tubes and canvases and brushes at the forefront? The strokes and streaks of these colors are brought down from the edge of that table and through the wood of the flooring, onto the sole of an upturned foot.
But does it matter? The heartache and beauty of the subjects are broadcast clearly, open for each viewer to layer on their own experiences, project their own desires and fears. A painting with obvious answers can quickly bore, and the inquisitive features of these characters leaves endless room for interpretation and desire. The tenderness with which he renders these moments, these intimacies and soft spots, invites an appreciation of a less frequently considered sort of beauty.
This fantastic ultra-reality stuck in golden hour, with smoothed edges and waterfalls of liquid light is a deeply enchanting one. Dreamy and obscene, more than a bit cheeky, full of humor and freshness and frivolity but grounded in the pains and pleasures of daily life, Les Toil’s works are worlds fit for adult fairy tales as well as gallery walls.
