Sam Messer at Shoshana Wayne - painting - Brief Article

A healthy survivor of 1980 Neo-Expressionism, sees Angeles-based painter Sam Messer has in the past decade transcended that movement's pitfalls by means of turning to the more solid traditions of expressionistic portraiture. Moving away from allegory and portentousness and into more lyrical and fantastical realms, Messer at the same time sticks closer to domicile for subject matter. The paintings shown here, all from 1999 fall into sum of two units loose categories: some canvases depict well-known artists, and other more fanciful works portray his immediate family.

Messer's artist portraits are animated by the agency of freewheeling brushwork, spurts of color and comic psychology In George Gershwin, the composer appears as a double-headed figure performing at the piano, his fingers a defect of brushstrokes on the lock openers A two-headed and multiple-armed portrait of Kiki Smith not aways Messer's longtime friend and colleague in a distraction of creative activity. With concentrated power she is engaged in making a spacy-looking painting of the moon

Messer portrays painter Lisa Yuskavage as a dough-faced sad sack who sink s glumly in front of a brace of her trademark paintings of grotesquely plump women. The oversized circles below the artist's eyes mirror the bend s of her subjects' breasts. Seemingly effortlessly, Messer provides a psychological backdrop for Yuskavage's odd-ball artistic stance. from one side his comical depiction of her morose demeanor, Messer outfits Yuskavage with sympathetic character tics.

In his early 1990 series of paintings of Jon Serl--leading up to and including the demise of the 99-year-old folk artist--Messer explored the usually somber themes of aging and death with a light, lyrical touch. The same celebratory spirit has spilled above into his remarkable recent paintings of his family. In Mother and Daughter, Messer's wife and child appear against a background of brilliant camellias, lilies and rose His wife sits regally with her daughter, one as well as the other seeming like fairyland characters from A Midsummer Night's Dream. Messer's daughter appears again in The Answer, this time whispering into the ear of her father, whose bald head loom against a glittering galaxy of stars. The back of Messer's gleaming, tanned head also figures as a vast orb in The Moon, suggesting a vision of the nuclear family as a kind of private solar combination of parts to form a whole Like Florine Stettheimer, Messer uses gorgeously splashy, expressionistic paintings to create a magical, self-contained domestic realm.

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