“Charlie Butler is keeping appropriation alive and well with his lusty photography of, well, photographs! This is his primary method of image building these days. He scans magazines for images of women, photographs them, and begins his editing process. With filters, crops, slices, and dices, his conventionally beautiful subjects start taking on a lurid or sickened look that happens to be layered with art historical reference. Charlie is part digital Dr. Frankenstein, part Larry Flynt, with a little John Baldessari, Richard Prince, and Andy Warhol.

The fragmented “relics” that result from Charlie’s visual strategies show obvious signs of artistic tampering as their source material remains easily recognizable: fashion, and porn. These sources have a reputation for influential on what is considered physically desirable. Not Charlie’s versions, his images are devolutions of beauty, a critique of the institutions, techniques, and maybe even individual tastes that spawn the industry of manufactured ideas of feminine beauty, and certain corners of sexual desire.

Charlie’s art is very suggestive in nature, the response I keep having is to associate the work with a society saturated in sublimated sex. Perhaps these art pieces are come-ons designed to engage us in the contemplation of the contemporary landscape of allure; a primal battle for attention waged by dutiful capitalist poised to pounce on anyone with a charge card and a proclivity toward their brand of rhetoric. In this way they can bring out pulp associations of the femme fatal! One thing I am sure of is that the images are as much about what is edited out as they are about what is included. The images do more suggesting than they do answering and I think Charlie likes it that way.”