It’s hard not to call Anthony White a painter. He masterfully composes opulent still life paintings of mass-produced objects and icons, evoking sensations of nostalgia and guilt. In Life, or Something Like It (2025), for example, the blocky red Sports Illustrated logo obscures a pack of Camel cigarettes, a clown doll, a Daffy Duck sticker, and other 2000s pop commodities being deluged by a gushing garden hose. The assemblage evokes the vibe of a teen-dream skater boy’s room, while provoking the pointed query, “Do we all own that much stuff?” It’s not only his talent for rendering objects in a hyperreal, sugar rush style true to their drop-ship origins that is admirable, but the draftsmanship required to make these compositions flow chaotically, but never randomly.
However, White is not a traditional painter. He creates his complex pieces using layers of Polyactic acid string, a material used for 3-D printing. On a screen or from afar, the medium is imperceptible: the grooves between each plastic line disappear, making the 2D works seem simple, smooth, like the objects in White’s plastic universe.
Like Ed Ruscha and Richard Hamilton, White’s fascination with Western consumerist life is complicated. His works mirror incessant pop-up ads found online and IRL, characterized by flashy colors, bold typefaces, and clickbait catchphrases, both enticing and annoying. Rendering the human-made world in robot-used plastic, White asks us to witness the monstrous impossibility of something deceptively simple and unrealistically smooth.