A generous, look-for-yourself openness animates all of Klamen’s paintings. In his multi-part, mix-and-match installations, hard-and-fast distinctions between Realism and Romanticism dissolve, as do the ordinarily fixed boundaries between objectivity and subjectivity, abstraction and representation, intention and accident, high and low, East and West, past and present. As a whole, his art abandons the monotheism on which much modern art-making is based for the polytheism of the ancient Greeks. Klamen’s oeuvre pluralizes the phrase "god-like creativity," transforming a fundamental component of modern art in the West into an ad hoc collaboration among contradictory figures, whose comic squabbles and tragic disagreements often result in down-to-earth wisdom for those of us who observe them. In Klamen’s hands, the self and whatever it isn’t take off on trips with no end in sight but satisfactions all around.

David Pagel is an art critic who writes for the Los Angeles Times, Artforum, Art in America, Flash Art, and others. He is a Professor of Art Theory and History, and the Roland Reiss Endowed Chair in Art at Claremount Graduate University.