Robin Williams paints red-blooded American children being adorably cute, and doubting it.
At first glance, her paintings look like updated Norman Rockwells. The neighborhood is safe. The kids are positively precious, their shenanigans as sweet and harmless as baby corn.
So too with the manner of her brush. Her confident simplifications of form, line and color--juicy, to say the least--offer an idealized dream of ordinary suburbia. She hits her notes with impressive, smoothly becalmed facility. The surface is measured, controlled, altogether untroubled...
But look! At odds with the lollipop tenderness of the depictions are the kids themselves. They are terrified. Williams convincingly and subtly renders their introspection as a complexity of indigestible magnitude. It hovers in a liminal, unstable space between anger, desire and not knowing--with a think-again grandeur that haunts the paintings.
These kids are a second point of entry into the work--as intuitive and loaded as the rest of it is resolved and finished. And this is the very thing that distinguishes Williams from earlier figurative masters, such as Fischl, Yuskavage and Currin, who subsume their subjects in the politics and aesthetics of (satirical) style and pointedly (and perhaps arrogantly) refuse them the fiction and problem of selfhood.
The humanity that Williams sneaks in between the cracks is quite possibly dangerous. Like little Frankenstein monsters, her wunderkind do their bit, without any understanding of why they are here. What is clear is that they are not themselves enchanted by their own cuteness. And that they cannot conceive of any action that is not immediately absorbed into the homogenized texture of it all, as though their every gesture were stuck in the good entertaining spirit of play and remained always on display, like it was all just a movie.
Rembrandt once and for all collides with Rockwell. Return of the repressed. All very good. Language against language. But Williams, who will be celebrating her 24th birthday the night of the opening, speaks plainly in the voice of a new generation, who are not impressed by the superior privilege of ironic distance. No one seems to ever grow up any more. To her, this is of grave concern.
Robin Williams received her BFA in 2006 from the Rhode Island School of Design. This is her first solo show. At the opening, we will be celebrating her 24th birthday.
Nathan Lewis is a history painter. His works are epic and his references very direct.
Most people will immediately recognize his monumental Till We Find the Blessed Isles where our Friends Are Dwelling (titled after a line from Nietzsche's Zarathustra ) as a modern remake of Emanuel Leutze's Washington Crossing the Delaware . They might even see themselves in the painting, as these are ordinary Americans, drawn from among the artist's circle of acquaintances, and they are, like most of us, a tad shy of heroic--really just along for the ride.
Many of Lewis's paintings are grand in scale. And almost all are depictions of terror--not of an enemy as such, but of our own fundamental impotence in the face of harsh reality, as the corporate and governmental institutions that we historically relied on collapse around us. Pure helplessness. In Aqualung , another of his mammoth works, a whole slew of anguished victims struggle to stay afloat; a radio control tower sinks into the sea. Perhaps it has always been thus. But since 9/11, we identify. Mortality, vulnerability, fear--it is a pervasive state of consciousness.
The Painted Bird brings it to a more intimate level. It could easily be a scene out of Hitchcock's masterpiece. The phantasmagoric flurry of feathers, claws and beaks turns the sky itself cruel with violence. The paint is toothy and visceral. Up close and personal we see grown men cower. It is so convincingly executed, we can only wince.
This is Nathan Lewis's first New York solo show. In 2006, Benjamin Genocchio reviewed his solo show at Grand Projects in New Haven for The New York Times . He has been in two shows at the Adlrich Contemporary art museum, one at the National Academy of Art in Bulgaria and has shown extensively throughout New England. His only New York appearance was at the Pulse Art Fair with Freight and Volume in 2006. Nathan Lewis received his MFA in 2006 from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts and Tufts University and his BFA from the Lyme Academy College of Fine Arts. He also studied at the Florence Academy of Art and in St. Petersburg, Russia.
