It took Elvis and Emma Lee four months of eight-pages-before-bed to get through Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan’s award-winning biography of Willem de Kooning, but after sleeping with Dutchman through most of the spring (they made room in their queen-size bed for the 600-page tome), Elvis feels like he has a better understanding of that particular kind of abstraction that blends forward and back, figure and landscape, bright and mud onto one canvas. De Kooning, after all, made that particular vernacular of AbEx famous in his fleshy, torn up women and his melting Long Island landscapes.
So, he was excited to walk into Cecily Brown’s exhibition at Gagosian’s W. 24th Street location last night. Immediately, Elvis threw back his cape and shouted “uh uh huh!” at the giant, leafy green canvas that introduces the sprawling gallery show. A lot of Brown’s earlier work relied more on fractured figures, but these were landscapes, fields and swamps and cities that loomed big over the glammed up Chelsea crowd.
There’s no doubt Brown is a painter’s painter; her full-to-the-hilt canvases use palattes the size of a city block to dodge in and out and around a particular color. They are not approaching monochrome in the literal sense, but each one has its dominant color, be it green, white, blue, or in the case of the gallery’s north-western-most room, fleshtone. (Here lies the first problem of the exhibition; in a show as profoundly large as CB’s, to have “one of each” in so many hues makes Elvis start thinking nasty thoughts about which would look best above the couch.)
The work more than nodded to earlyish late De Kooning; bold, bright landscapes with figures hidden in plain view. Some of them were torn apart and plastered in direct quotation of Willem; while more often Brown’s paintings were populated with tiny friends: little noses and the two quick lines of a mouth tucked above a bright line of color; a dollop that could have been just a dollop but could maybe also be a head.
Elvis could have searched all night for the little arms and legs of figuration, but it would have been futile. The full-up picture-plane, the swirling colors that bounced between muddled thickets and bright punches of direct light, the occasional calm swath of blue or white expanses (water? sky?) were much more intoxicating. Chuck Close’s wheelchair was also mesmerizing (it made the Segway look like a wheelbarrow).
The good news is her paintings are beautiful. But Elvis, who went with Emma Lee and the Porcelain Rose, limped back to the 8th Avenue Line with a heavy heart. Why? In part, it was because he’d been asked to leave by Larry’s blue-coated squadron (the only other guest to get the honor was the spacesuited hobo; hence the off-kilter pic, snapped on his way out). But more than the early exit, Elvis felt something was missing from the dense canvases: adventure.
Brown’s a Brit that’s been showing in NYC for a decade plus, first at Deitch, when she was a mere pip of a thing at 28, and since 2000 with Larry and his cold-shouldered crew. The work was smart, once or perhaps even three times, but at a certain point in the gargantuan show it became so tightly done it turned safe, toeing the line of blue-chip droll. Brown’s triumph, and in Elvis’s humble opinion, her potential downfall, is that she is caged into her fortunate circumstance. A young, British lady artist, she was at right place, at the right time, with the right dealer (s). You could predict her exact arrival by looking at the plots on a scattergram (a cluster around the legacy of the Ab Ex, the emerging rabid love of YBA, and the decline of Schnabel et al). She came up when the artworld was ready for another dose of abstract meditation; it was not lost on anyone that De Kooning could have been her grandfather, nor that her work was just young and edgy and feminine enough to be intoxicating. She inserted herself into a niche that, historically couldn’t have come a moment earlier, pissed on her fire extinguisher, staked her flag, and started painting. A decade later, she’s gotten everything a (still) young artist could ask for; but one of these days she must start asking herself the question the Porcelain Rose asked as the trio rumbled underground to Houston: What next? What now?
Emma Lee has been cheating on Elvis. The last few weeks she’s been dreaming about another, a man in a white linen suit. He’s lanky and wrinkled, casual and always happy to see her. Each night, she tries to quell her nervous, assuage the butterflies with a chant of “down, buddy, down.” He’s always coming towards her with a smile and a calloused hand stuck out, treading across wide, old hardwood floors in nice shoes. She sense they are in a downtown loft, but the walls are different each time, as are the chairs–wicker one day, Knoll the next. He’s not with his guitar and she not with her resume; theirs is an exchange of mutual interest and quiet excitement.
