Yesterday's art opening at Mind Puddles. The gallery is owned by a friend of Mehregan, Naveed. My friend Christa also works there. The following is basically copied and pasted from what I told Lauren in an email:

I was especially intrigued by the graphite and black ink drawings of Allan Rodewald, where you have a certain perception of gesture, its trace and its erasure. You had more or less an idea of how it was done. His air brush pieces were less interesting on the other hand. They all had this motif of veils and sheets painted on a canvas. It was an interesting study of the illusion of texture, but not much beyond that. I had the chance to chat with Allan, because Mehregan is a bit more sociable than I am and because Naveed introduced us to two of the artists present. I felt compelled to tell Allan the Plato allegory of the two painters (the one with the painter who was good enough to fool animals and the one who was so good he managed to fool human beings). I'm not sure whether he realized this was a honest critique of those composition. Because what most guests were talking about at the opening was money, transactions and other arcane business principles. The guy who was talking to Allan before us kept telling him he (the speaker) would become a good artist because he could move around a lot of money. It was despicable and reminded me of an argument I had with my friend Scott about whether artists should take marketing classes. But it was an interesting game to see who was an MFA and an MBA, because some of the business people tried very hard to look like they belonged to an artist scene, yanno, with the bleached hair, the earring and the untucked Armani shirt and leather jacket.

Another somewhat interesting artist was Cintia Rico. Mehregan was a big fan of her work, for some reason (probably because she was a woman). It was mostly a study of the female body. But it felt too clean, despite the ragged edges of the canvases. It pretty much seemed that she had taken a projector and used watercolors (in interesting ways, sure) to cover the photos. It looked nice, a bit Pop Art-y, but it felt too distant and manufactured. Not to mention that they all looked static with all those vertical and horizontal lines.

Yes, I am too lazy to type anything new and different for you, dear Blog Reader. Other artists whose work was featured were CJ Ancira, J. Antonio Farfan and Aimee Chappell Hertog