DEMO-CRAZY

PAINTING

Acrylic and oil on canvas.

Painted surface 150 x 180 cm (59.06 x 70.87 in ) in a format of 150 x 180 cm (59.06 x 70.87 in)

Year of realization 2018

Signed on the bottom right of the piece.

Figurative painting, it seems, is destined to be contemporary art’s perennial sidepiece: always available for a fling, never for very long. The last time one could admit to a passion for it without committing social suicide in the art world was probably around 2003, when the painter John Currin had his midcareer survey at the Whitney Museum of American Art, in New York. Currin, known for injecting new ideas into age-old images of the body, was handsome, successful, and youthful. His peers were also of the moment: Elizabeth Peyton palled around with Marc Jacobs, and George Condo bedeviled collectors with lewd portraiture. The year before Currin’s retrospective, an exhibition curated by Alison Gingeras at the Centre Pompidou, in Paris, “Dear Painter, Paint Me…Painting the Figure Since Late Picabia,” had opened to acclaim. As the critic Roberta Smith observed in TheNew York Times, “reports of painting’s death have been exaggerated for about 30 years.”
“The body in crisis is increasingly present in our daily lives,” notes MoMA PS1 curator and associate director Peter Eleey, who headed up the “Greater New York” 2015 curatorial team. “Whether it’s in reference to the refugee situation”—he didn’t specify which one, but there are plenty—“or the way the media is processing Black Lives Matter, abstraction has been comfortable—for us. But it doesn’t give shape to the discomforts and questions that I think a lot of us are grappling with.” Deitch seconds that, adding, “This is not a time when a ponderous Mark Rothko painting about myth is relevant.” He ventures that figurative painting allows for more-diverse cultural content—clothing, skin color, setting—than abstraction ever can.

-W - Fan Zhong