She has opened her fur coat to reveal a vast, fleshy bodyscape that nearly fills the composition. A full-length portrait, Old Fur, shows a reclining female nude with a rather handsome face. Sensitively rendered, she would be totally credible as a charming seductress were it not for her muscular truck driver’s arms and hands. Inexplicably-and unfortunately-the artist chose for the work an ostentatious and hideous gilt frame that served only to fight the image and push it toward the realm of kitsch.īig Hands is a tender portrait of a young, buxom blonde. Brilliant passages like these show Currin in command of his craft. Billowing clouds in the cerulean sky contrast with the bright red ribbons flowing from one woman’s straw hat. Among the best paintings, The Dogwood Thieves is an unusually airy and luminous scene of two young women embracing. One, a dresser or tailor, bends over slightly to measure the backside of his client, presumably to make another pair of hot pants. The absurd Hot Pants recalls a painting by Paul Cadmus, as two middle-age gentlemen stand before a full-length mirror in silly-looking outfits of short pants, suit jackets and knee socks. One of the largest paintings (88 by 68 inches), The Women of Franklin Street, perhaps refers to a Manhattan neighborhood of artists’ lofts where, in Currin’s imagination at least, scenes like this-of a capricious lesbian ménage à trois-take place on a daily basis. The kinky sexual situations and casual homosexual innuendo expected in Currin’s work are in play again, too. Currin skewers Edvard Munch with this deadpan ode to 1960s-style existential angst. The protagonist of The Scream, for instance, a rather unadorned portrait of a woman with a bouffant hairdo, looks like a hysterical suburban housewife. Not entirely absent is Currin’s cast of grotesque characters, as if borrowed from a particularly extreme TV show, but they are a little less freakish this time. The overall feel of the exhibition is mellower than in earlier outings by the 48-year-old Colorado-born artist, and the distortions of the figures are less pronounced. In the best works in this show, Currin channels Ingres and late Renoir. Previously, he aspired to the technical polish of Lucas Cranach and the exuberant eroticism of François Boucher. In the end, he may have wound up pleasing only himself, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. As evidenced by the painstaking technical refinements in the 13 oil paintings from the past two years on view in this recent exhibition, John Currin dug deep into his ever-burgeoning bag of painterly tricks to gain new fans and impress old ones.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |