WaPo

Mark Jenkins has a cool review today in the Washington Post about my solo show at Artists and Makers Studios II in Rockville.

Nudes, superheroes, language, autobiography, art history and biblical tales are among “The Obsessions of F. Lennox Campello,” as summarized by the title of his show at Artists & Makers 2. Rather than pack lots of these interests within a single frame, the local artist and critic disperses them across more than 50 drawings, prints and mixed-media pieces. The individual works are often spare, with a single small figure isolated on a vast sheet of paper or a shard of broken pottery. The subjects, mostly female, include painter Frida Kahlo and Lilith, Adam’s pre-Eve gal pal (according to the Talmud). 

His technique is classical, but he sometimes incorporates a contemporary technology: embedded video. “Portrait of You” features a live feed of the picture’s viewer, and “Cuban by Ancestry, but American by the Grace of God” (seen last year at the American University Museum) chronicles his family history on a video loop. The combination of drawn and electronic images can be gimmicky, notably in a piece that places flickering video on the forehead of (who else?) Frida Kahlo. But a man who nurses so many fixations must commandeer many channels to broadcast them all.

Read the whole Galleries column here.