Perry Rubenstein Gallery presents Brooklyn-based multimedia artists FAILE. The artist collaborative returns on November 4th with Bedtime Stories, an exhibition of new works that feature imagery mined from FAILE’s singular visual archive and that emphasize the painterly dimensions of their frenetic visual tapestries.

Following on the heels of two major projects—the interactive arcade of Deluxx Fluxx and the haunting, allegorical suite, Lost in Glimmering Shadows—Bedtime Stories is a return to fundamentals that pushes questions of form and process to the forefront. Each of the twelve works’ compositions are assembled from numerous painted wooden blocks and they emerge as unified paintings. They reveal FAILE’s relentless assimilation and refinement of the vast visual vocabularies of both the urban environment and their own decade-long practice. The grids of these paintings are at once modular and fixed, tactile and graphic. On their surfaces, iconoclastic characters fluidly intermingle with adroit deconstructions of commodity culture. The re-combinations of carefully constructed texts and images provide a glimpse into FAILE’s rigorous and organic process, and draw attention to painting’s inherent materiality.

Works such as Addicted & Alone and Faile Launch reshape painterly traditions of pointillism and the affichistes, while simultaneously suggesting newer media that draws on the pixelation of digital technology and the improvisational roots of collage and street art. Bedtime Stories presents works of a neo-baroque ilk yet they are aggressively beautiful while underscoring FAILE’s continued exploration of formal and aesthetic inquiry and evolution.