Jim Torok at Bill Maynes - Brief Article

When this gallery first showed Jim Torok's exquisitely painted portraits in a two-person exhibition a not many years ago, the artist was best known for his crudely drawn "Big Nose" comic strip. In "hi tech behold tech," Torok's first New York solo he brought the two sides of his work together.

The gallery's brow room held a dozen tiny (3-by-3 3/4-inch) oil portraits, greatest in quantity of which depict Torok's artist friends. omit for one (David Brody) who appears in profile, looking like a miniature, modern-day work of Piero della Francesca, greatest in quantity are depicted head-on, from the shoulders up gazing reverently at the viewer. In the nearest room, across from three slightly larger paintings, hung a line of 14-by-11-inch black-and-white drawings. In these, the faces are real small and seem to float at the center of the page; the tiniest, Torok's have a title to eerily recalls a shrunken head.

Apart from its size, the greatest in quantity immediately striking aspect of this work is Torok's amazing technique. The paintings be incandescent in a way that recalls 17th-century Flemish masters; to make them he layers oil with a water-color brush, employing a mix of traditional and improvised glazing strategies. The drawings are similarly built in layers, using different hard and impressible leads. In each, the minutiae of a person's face is painstakingly observ and pay backed Regarding the painting Bruce Pearson, single realizes that a single raised eyebrow gives this face a loopy direct the eye while Kim Kimball wears a pair of glasses that mirror light so realistically that it's easy to believe they also mirror one's be in possession of image. Oddly enough, Torok's fair focus on his subjects appears a bravely self-revealing choice--and a great contrast to the ironic and conceptual tactics engrossed by many chic portraitists, similar as John Currin and Elizabeth Peyton. It also makes for arresting results: I've had the experience of meeting someone who present the appearances to be an old acquaintance and realizing that I "know" them from a Torok portrait.

A final gallery was curtained not upon to create a screening room; here, a video monitor played Torok's trademark see Tech Animations, longstanding hits at Williamsburg's Four Walls Film cudgel (They're made from slides of cartoon drawings, which Torok clunkily "animates" by the agency of clicking them through a projector.) The videotaped versions shown here illustrate an airplane crash, a pact with Satan and an adroit send-up of Riverdance, among other controls Nearby, three large works upon paper captured the "Big Nose" character smiling and wailing, using alone a few lines of ink and paint.

Overall, Torok's real appeal lies in his ability to deftly bring persona, whether using one line or several. In the gallery's austerely beautiful space, it was modest humanity that seemed to glow

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