"Adam Cvijanovic's Colossal Spectacle"

Hollywood, 1915

There’s no escaping the impressive scope of Adam Cvijanovic’s latest exhibition, which uses as its point of departure D.W. Griffith’s grandiose 1916 silent masterpiece (and box-office bomb) Intolerance. When assailing the fall of a megalomaniacal artist, with a nod to our military misadventures in the Middle East, it helps to have your technique down cold. And Cvijanovic’s paintings of the Hollywood landscape—film stills as well as rows of houses in the desert—are accomplished and assured.

The impressive centerpiece of the show is Belshazzar’s Feast, a series of 16-foot-tall panels of the artist’s interpretation of a scene from Griffith’s film. They fill the entire back gallery and are propped up by an intricate skeleton of wooden beams: It’s like being surrounded by the very props from this epic, stillborn as a dud.

Smaller paintings of the highway strips of modern-day Southern California continue the sense of atmospheric decay. You can almost feel the warm air moving through an auto body shop where not everything deserves to be salvaged. The horizontal painting Hollywood 1915 returns to Griffith’s heroic failure. In a panoramic composition, Cvijanovic imagines how the towering sets of Intolerance would have dwarfed a nearby town. Seen through a distant haze, we can only appreciate their impressive size, and fall under the illusionistic spell that they cast. This is one mirage that’s all too easy to believe.