Kenney Mencher is a local artist who does really creative works on both paper and canvas. There is something about his paintings that just draws you into them and begs you to look at the story behind the beautiful lines that you see there. My favorite description of his work comes from an article that Rebecca Wallace wrote a couple of years back which she started off by saying:

“A Kenney Mencher painting is like a man crying on a bus. You aren’t supposed to watch, but something nags at you to look closer.”

That seems about right. Well, I suppose that you are supposed to look at Kenney’s paintings but there’s something so subtly provocative about them that you almost feel like you’re not supposed to … mmm, but like you definitely really want to.

You want to know what the people in these paintings are doing - because it’s the people that Kenney paints that are really appealing even though he has some still lifes and other non-people paintings as well. It’s the human emotion that he somehow incorporates into the human form that really gets you interested in looking at his paintings. Just take a look at the two paintings here (titled Ritual and New Tie respectively) and you can see what I mean.

And you can get a closer look at Kenney’s work (including those two pieces) by checking out his new show which opens later this week at Arthaus. The opening reception is on Thursday, April 2nd from 6-8 at the gallery which is located at 411 Brannan Street. The work, which is all in black-and-white and so particularly striking, will be up through late June so even if you can’t make the opening, you should check it out at some point.

Also, for those people in San Francisco who think that tango is sexy (and there are a lot of those people here in this city), I’d also recommend taking a look at Kenney’s “dance and tango” series of paintings which you can see online by following that last link.

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This entry was posted on Monday, March 30th, 2009 at 8:33 am and is filed under Art. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.