Josh Lilley is proud to present Paranoid style, a group exhibition of four Los Angeles-based artists exploring interconnectivity through abstraction, evasion and adaptation.

The exhibition’s title refers to the influential essay The paranoid style in American politics by historian Richard Hofstadter, first published in Harper’s Magazine in 1964 and a keystone text in the mapping of conspiracy theory and ‘movements of suspicious discontent’ within the western psyche. Looking beyond the contemporary political echoes of Hofstadter’s text, the exhibition explores the socio-analytical potential of art in a post-truth, hyper-individualist society, revealing the consequential subversion of absolutism from both the left and right. Collectively, the four practices of Nehemiah Cisneros, Jacob Fenton, Salim Green and Sula Bermudez-Silverman initiate a dialogue grounded in the lore of LA, extrapolating it out into the wider United States and beyond.

Nehemiah Cisneros (b.1986, Los Angeles) is a chronicler of the entangled histories of Los Angeles through his densely painted narratives. Inspired by the collectables that once adorned his family’s Inglewood store, Cisneros’ compositions merge different modes of historical and fictional iconography rooted in Black Americana, frequently shuffling several sources of association; pairing male characters pulled from 1970s Blaxploitation films with manga, outsider art, Théodore Géricault’s 1819 masterpiece The raft of the Medusa and the surrealist collages of Max Ernst. Cisneros’s immersive canvases – often monumental in scale – offer a through line in the class divide that connects via entertainment media consumption, emphasizing the need to undermine the strictures of the canon in order to consider a new revisionism.

Jacob Fenton (b.1999, Los Angeles) extends his concern beyond the traditional cultural sphere into the realm of social media and the 24-hour news cycle; the extrapolated language of the Hollywood machine. Sourcing subjects related to conspiracy and the fractured narratives of online discourse, Fenton’s paintings are rendered through an atmospheric lens, blurring its subject and exploring the notion of overexposure, highlighting the dangers in perspective shift that can occur when faith is placed in a ruling mythos. The dehumanising environment of the global citizen can induce, as Hofstadter writes, ‘relation to authority, characterized by an inability to find other modes for human relationship than those of more or less complete domination or submission.’ It is the methodological inconsistencies in these relationships to power that Fenton seeks to reveal, choosing subjects that, whilst still relevant and truthful in their relation to resistance, conjure a parable into the seamless submission to fascism.

Salim Green (b.1996, Middletown, CT) approaches anti-establishment intervention by engaging in the concepts of concealment and abstraction, his practice assuming the metaphorical position of evasion- from authority, domination, visibility or identity- as an act of agency. Much of Green’s work draws from Dark forest theory, a hypothesis that interplanetary civilizations hide from each other out of self-preservation, and in order to prevent conflict over resources. Originating from specific points of LA geography, Green’s paintings are systematically obfuscated by his mark-making, rendering them abstract.What remains is painting as anti-representation, yet pro-characteristic, posing a question also present in Fenton’s practice: what does “my work” look like, exactly?

Sula Bermudez-Silverman (b.1993, New York) arrives at her sculptures through a process of rigorous research, expatiating and abstracting the cultural derivations of her chosen subjects, stacking links of association until they form a nexus of interrelation, transcending a singular time or place. Through the repurposing and reconstruction of familiar objects, her work uncovers concealed narratives and interconnections, unveiling the forces that shape our structures of meaning. Utilizing semiotics of both organic and industrial forms, Bermudez Silverman’s multimedia sculptures appear both ancient and futuristic, relics of a lost civilisation, pushing their association into something more fabled and biotic. Her practice poses a field of categorical indeterminacy, where hierarchies of power and connotations of status are compressed, forming new networks that embrace transience, fallibility and adaptation.