Picture this, chrome, cherry, cream. I was imagining taking her to get a sundae. I want to watch her eat a banana split as it is blatantly erotic. I think about ordering for her. Two scoops of strawberry, whipped cream, chocolate sauce and two maraschinos. There's something there... linoleum, strawberry, and silver cups and a long spoon. My hands are dirty in my pocket. I feel fuck. Deject. I watched her dissolve a tab of acid in the dixie cup and drink it with caramel. There is so much blood on our earth. There is a fire in the diner. There is a fire that heats the vinyl seats until the reds run and blood covers the booths. There is a fire in the diner on Western. Picture this and the urinals in the bathroom over flow with blood and the grease from the fryer is melting the black and white checkered floor. The chrome and metal that rounds the counter is getting hotter and hotter until the metal peels from the plastic. All of the ice cream melts. - Jools Rothblatt

_____

Carlye Packer is pleased to announce Jools Rothblatt’s Life in Brodo, the Los Angeles-based artist's first solo exhibition with the gallery. In the exhibition’s 11 paintings, figures join with pugilistic intensity, their raw distended limbs a testament to Rothblatt's brash mastery of the medium, a rugged, at times inebriated, approach to representation.

There is something very Californian and very suburban about Rothblatt’s paintings, in an honest way. Rothblatt surveys Los Angeles's dimly-lit watering holes presenting grisly scenes of rollicking, from their moody interiors alongside pictures inspired by these institutions’ curious signage. Rothblatt’s subjects are typically found inside bars, family restaurant decor, faded commercial signs, stuff from around the neighborhoods she grew up in especially. The figures and protagonists of the paintings flail and combine in minimal, murky environments of  predominantly red and green. The distance between the viewer and what's depicted is emphasized in imprecision and balanced out in a kind of tragic comedy. In the film Three Women, Shelley Duvall's character makes a point to write in her diary every day "even if not much happened anyway” and there is something similar happening in Rothblatt’s paintings, capturing the tragic comedy of our day-to-day life. Inspired by artists such as Chaim Soutine, Lee Lozano, Philip Guston, and Otto Dix, Rothblatt’s paintings display a notable vitality, dynamism, and persistence in their scrutiny of socialized gender or body politics, and energetically critiqued norms of respectability and behavioral customs.

The exhibition opens January 27th, and will be on view through February 17th.