Extremely different in their approaches to the language of painting, each artist offers a unique perspective on
what painting might be like when not participating in the current trend of copycat mediocrity and mechanical art,
a.k.a. “zombie formalism,” a term coined by Walter Robinson. Neither Arango and Arnold are interested in
commenting on the history of painting nor being categorized in the art business. Instead, both have been following
their own bliss in a world full of reductive and abstract paintings.
Daniel Arango draws obsessively in AutoCAD and prints his artworks on paper in a cereal box format. These
images on cereal boxes draw upon the icons of the popular world, such as James Franco, Lady Gaga, Justin
Bieber, Miley Cyrus, and Mother Teresa. He has embarked on a spiritual quest since 2010 by traveling all over
the world carrying a cereal box with him. Arango treats the box as a pseudo-religious object, and he performs
as he eats and shares the cereal with strangers.
Working from life rather than photos, Kevin Arnold updates and harnesses a vocabulary of Trompe-l'œil. By
choosing to paint objects with no immediate aesthetic value, he tricks us about the distance between the day-
to-day existence and our awareness by abstracting the represented reality. He employs the physical scale in oil
painting as an original commodity as intended and plays with the shapes of the canvas, colors of the shadows,
textures of the surface in oil paint.