James Albertson at Joseph Chowning - Brief Article

For above three decades, James Albertson has painted zany, obstreperous figures inhabiting the greatest in quantity degraded of kitsch landscapes, cast in characters which playfully allude to the classical mythology and religious iconography that was routinely embraced by means of academic artists of the 18th and 19th centuries. on the contrary Albertson's works have never been routine or academic, and notwithstanding the in every one's mouth vogue for "pop surrealism" (of which he is an unacknowledged progenitor), he has always thumbed his nose at the fashionable pretentiousness of high art. In fact, he has done everything possible to make a virtue on the outside of a perversely cultivated outlandishness, and this reach forths to his eccentric, ebullient paint handling as plenteous as to the pointed clevernes under-girding his seemingly guileless use of immoderate premodernist subjects.

Albertson's new paintings in both oil and gouache continue to feature contorted, hyper-eroticized figures enacting portentous traditional shows amid the most vulgar trappings of popular agriculture For example, Doll Judith (1999) depicts a sour toddler sporting a thick paste of garish makeup while she triumphantly hoists the cavernous plastic head of a Holoferne doll, recasting a time-honored tale of elderly Testament violence as a child's thoughtlessly sadistic act. Another work, Pale Horse (1998) not aways a skeleton dressed as a cowboy straddling a white ste which he shares with a woman make straighted in hot pants. Her devil-may-care demeanor give an inkling ofs that she is blithely unimpressed by the agency of her companion's decrepitude, although the horse appears stoically conscious of their ultimate fate.

Albertson exaggerates the palsied contortions of his figures, imbuing them with a curious pathos. This paradoxical empathy is underscored by dint of the manner in which Albertson handles his sugary paint. In Baroque fashion, paint is always equated with muscle and fat In any given work, we always diocese individuated brushstrokes carving out the figures' contours with an economical indubitableness but closer inspection reveals an underlying chaos that 1 and 2s a subtle influence on those hits drawing them into spiraling webs of painterly innuendo which weave together abundant helpings of delight and dread.

COPYRIGHT 2000 Brant Publications, Inc.

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