LILKOOL’s THE REBEL: A Collision of Color, Memory, and Defiance

You can feel the underlying energy in the artwork of LILKOOL before you understand it; it has a voltage that runs through it. LILKOOL (Joshua Maupin) creates expressionistic art that finds its source from childhood memories and cultural disruptions, which have a gritty street-like feel and a polished surface from today's highly commercialized world. Each piece of his latest collection called "The Rebel," produced in Brooklyn and Los Angeles, contains this same energy and has been produced with a high degree of visual clarity, making for pieces that may appear confrontational.

Instead of feeling comfortable, The Rebel creates and then leans into a sense of tension through the intense use of color in ways that create vivid contrasts, thick outlines, and attractive cartoonish, comical shapes. You expect each individual piece to be either funny, silly, or whimsical when you see the shapes, but within the contexts of each individual piece of art, the tone shifts from being a nostalgic, inviting image to one that ultimately breaks apart in front of the viewer.

LILKOOL has put together four of his most popular works into this collection and produced them in an edition of 30 on Hahnemühle German Etching, a fine-art reproduction paper. The texture of the printed surface, soft and fibrous, appears to provide additional emotional texture to each of the individual artworks. Thus, each work appears to be alive with the warmth and energy of the studio where it was created.

In LILKOOL's universe, ordinary suburban rooms and everyday characters warp into bizarre performances, yet this distortion of reality doesn't stem from random chaos. Instead, it originates from LILKOOL's discomfort with how popular media tends to flatten the self/desensitize ones uniqueness, thus creating a homogenized view of culture. Through The Rebel, LILKOOL resists this flattening influence; therefore, the collection contains jagged edges, extreme color and contradiction to human nature.

LILKOOL has always demonstrated this same reluctance to compromise throughout his career's journey, from Dallas to becoming a graffiti artist in New York City and through his current multi-media art practice, which includes collaborations with companies such as NIKE, APPLE, WARBY PARKER, VOGUE and AAPE and others. The Rebel embodies this same spirit by serving as a soft reminder that not all rebellions are expressed vocally - some rebellions express themselves as a consistent way of looking at life.

The work can be viewed at nikitingallery.com and will also be featured on ARTSY, providing the viewers with an opportunity to experience LILKOOL's art with plenty of time for thoughtful scrutiny, which will allow them to discover the humor, color, pop-art sheen and layers of emotion that lie beneath the art. The pieces will continue to offer new insights as one spends time contemplating them, revealing layers of tension, compassion, satire and a unique sort of honesty.

Rather than requesting to be sold or collected, The Rebel is asking for the audience to feel, to wrestle with, and to bear witness to the work. This collection provides a path into LILKOOL's personal universe, a space where rebellion exists as a heartbeat rather than as a phase or an act.