“Reports that say that something hasn't happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns—the ones we don't know we don't know. And if one looks throughout the history of our country and other free countries, it is the latter category that tends to be the difficult ones.” - Donald Rumsfeld, US Secretary Of Defense, 2004 *
M. LeBlanc is pleased to present PROOF OF WERQ, the second solo exhibition of Chicago-based artist Ben Foch. The exhibition extends Foch’s ongoing series of toon paintings, featuring a group completed in the past year. These paintings are part of Foch’s larger conceptual project Cult of Cheetah, which also includes NFT’s and collectible cards (the first 10 of which debut in this exhibition in editions of 50). Here, Cult of Cheetah should be understood as a methodology, an organized approach Foch takes to contemporary painting in a shared visual field. It is a brand of method and an alternate reality environment at once.
For PROOF OF WERQ, Foch created a number of large scale canvases, with repeating patterns of universally recognizable animation characters– Bart and Marge Simpson, Spongebob, Chester Cheetah, Ren & Stimpy, and the first iteration of Mickey Mouse, Steamboat Willie. The works reference Foch’s ongoing interest in contemporary histories of hard-edge graphic painting (BMPT), early modern trompe l'oeil experiments, and his own career as a faux-finisher. Foch builds an opaque surface with thin layers of flat acrylic. He completes his characters with a glossy black outline, giving them a ‘sticker’ finish. While historicized by these decorative traditions, the present paintings– by default of Foch’s chosen imagery– must be located within a post Web3, open source framework.
Of interest and immediate concern to Foch is the deterritorialization and resignification of these characters through their global proliferation (Who owns what?). A child of the 80’s, Foch was brought up in the flea-market and mall culture of Chicago’s West Side, where bootleg hats and t-shirts of Nickelodeon and Disney characters were easy and exciting to find, each always a bit clunky and slightly varied by their executor (‘I don’t believe Anybody owns Anything’). This adolescent aesthetic education connected for Foch two parallel narratives: the historical avant-garde and its readymade on one side, and ‘kitsch’ (a mutable expression of pop seriality) in the form of animation and collectibles on the other.
For example, Cult of Cheetah trading cards function like Marcel Duchamp’s L.H.O.O.Q, 1919 (Mona Lisa with mustache). One of the only two-dimensional readymades Duchamp ever produced, the postcard was what he called a ‘rectified’ readymade, or a readymade that is either marked or altered without the addition of another readymade like in Bicycle Wheel, 1913 for example. Foch similarly fudges and exploits his chosen images; in Pillow Queen (Dark Mode) and Venus/Olympia/Marge, both 2023, Marge dons Chester’s cheetah spots and becomes an image in Foch’s alt-reality cheetah cult. While staking individual claim, altering a readymade image also establishes, by its signaling to, collective ownership. (Think Duchamp’s Fountain). The mustache and cheetah and the signature represent the legitimacy and functionality of vandalism as a productive and worthy tool to course correct the mass alienation of the general public from art.
*The opening quote omits the fourth category of knowledge, the ‘unknown knowns,’ of which Foch urges into view: the things we know but do not know we know and the things we do not know we own (like Steamboat Willie in public domain as of January 1, 2024).
Text courtesy Taylor Harriett Payton.
