Painting today is a discursive, theoretical practice, but the paintings in this exhibition, these petite operettas, insists on locating theory in the body's sense of pleasure and its attraction to unruly particular things.
These engaged artists are working in a thin zone where lyricism, visual invention, and vulgar playfulness explode what at first seem overly familiar practices and histories. Of course the biology of seeing and touching collides and colludes with the cultural mannerisms of reading and remembering. After all the body is both biologically and socially determined and consequently squirms with discomfort or dances with delight when those particular things in the world, not yet named or already laid to rest, appear as real, alive, strange, and necessary.
To see the nuanced artificiality of these colors, to experience the graphic squiggles that are closer to penmanship than unmediated expression, and to move through Rococo spaces furnished with hybrid, morphing objects is to meet language at the point where it "wounds and seduces (Roland Barthes)." These pictures shock and give pleasure to the body robbing us of our theoretical convictions and conventions. Universality gives way to vulgar, lyrical particularities, but not without the pathos that is always associated with the frailty of our ambivalent experiences and fragile, fictive histories.
A number of artists returned to painting in the 80s, seeing a vital thread that persisted in Baudelaire's sense of Realism. The hum of the body at the point of a cultural now was courted and theorized by many but has been sustained by few as acutely nuanced as Lasker, Nozkowski, and Stephan. These paintings do not recoil from the world but instead move the concerns of painting and theory back into the world and into the realm of the senses. With these six painters we become the fortunate witness to Modernism's necessary and mournful, but vital sea change.
Terry Thacker
October 28, 2005