Death is the Mother of BeautyArtpace and Finesilver crossed the proverbial streams by each opening a Jesse Amado exhibit last week, on the 8th and 9th respectively. The show at Artpace is a kind of mini-retrospective or survey of his work, while the Finesilver show is more like an upscale studio visit — from what I understand, it was not curated, and is a way of letting the artist show new work that Artpace doesn’t have the space for. The Finesilver show thus has the kind of loose, work-in-progress feel that Artpace residencies sometimes produce (empty cardboard boxes sitting in the corner, pieces hung with scotch tape).

The only common elements are recent compressed cellulose sponge pieces such as the one pictured here. Still using his signature Helvetica typeface (like design group Experimental Jet Set, Amado displays an unusual loyalty to Helvetica), Amado spells out the dots and dashes of a Morse-coded message. In other pieces, he uses the same medium to write out “death,” “desire,” and “beauty.” (Not coincidentally, I’m sure, the title of this Morse code piece is “Death is the Mother of Beauty” — a reference to a Wallace Stevens poem: “Death is the mother of beauty; hence from her, / Alone, shall come fulfilment to our dreams / And our desires.”)

At Artpace, the work spans a broad range of styles from Amado’s early felt cones (inspired by Joseph Beuys) to the stacked letters to the sponge pieces. Here we see him critique the exploitation of Joseph Beuys in a fashion magazine spread, while at Finesilver we see him echo Warhol’s secularization of The Last Supper. At one moment he references poetry about the ultimate meaning of death and sacrifice, at another he seems to use text as an almost arbitrary medium. Seeing these shows simultaneously (and hearing him talk about the work at Artpace) has brought to the forefront Amado’s schizophrenic ideas of art being just a “good picture” on the one hand and a philosophical statement on the other. It’s a schizophrenia he shares with much of the art world, trying to be decadent and austere, flippant and sincere.

I can’t tell if it’s a commentary on human nature or a defense mechanism.

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