St Louis, MO
3/20/15 6:33 PM
It becomes easier every day to make an image, even an image that by the standards of past generations would be considered sophisticated. I can do this on my laptop using Photo Booth; so can my five year old. Mike Behle uses images like these—uncannily mirrored photographs of a cluttered desktop or a still life, impossibly fractured surfaces of punched tin, all of them so simple to produce they’ve become banal, even though they’re not really. Behle truly uses them, both in the sense of deployment and exploitation. He makes them the random ground on which to produce simple paintings, each in a single straight-from-the-tube paint color that pops right off its dull backdrop. What does he paint? That remains to be seen. Some shapes register in a fuzzy way: maybe a figure with its arms out here, maybe a bunch of droopy flowers there. The sheer pleasure generated by looking at these pictures doesn’t quite add up from their parts. But then, Behle isn’t a mathematician, he’s an artist.
—Lori Waxman