It’s true that “Geoffrey Todd Smith is a Friend to Beauty,” as the latest installment of Chicago’s trendy stoner-art scene—his double-show at Western Exhibitions—is titled. Smith is also friends with people on Facebook, where he cutely snatched up his status updates to title the pieces for his current show, titles like “Geoffrey Todd Smith is Murdering the Rhythm like the RZA on Ritalin,” or “Geoffrey Todd Smith is Untitled.”
Smith’s pastel-primary-fluorescent paintings could pass for an acid-trip grandma’s precision-heavy quilt (if quilts were made of paper and gouache), or a petri-dish of magnified-pointillist bacteria (if bacteria were perfectly circular and extra psychedelic). Chicago magazine dubbed him an artist to watch that everyone should be collecting right this very minute, and it’s easy to see why. His double-show at Western Exhibitions provides two rooms of decorative-enough paintings. Sadly, the intensity and air of relentless patience and mechanical precision evident in each of his paintings must drag around decorativeness’ stigmatized baggage. His grids of circles are steeped in a broth of bedazzled zigzags and, upon close examination, the velvety qualities of what looks like solid dots and hoops from afar are really multiple layers of vibrato. Smith’s attention to detail is just as striking as the oddball colors he stretches over each circle he fills, but this does not mean he makes no mistakes. Where lines of jellybean plops collide with Spirographic circles, things are likely to get messy. (Natalie Edwards)
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