James McGarrell at George Adams - Brief Article

"Table Top Joys: novel Still-life Paintings," an exhibition of oils through James McGarrell, was, in a word, weird. For decades McGarrell has been known for manifold paintings that jumble myth, invented fictions and surreal landscapes. His of recent origin work continues in this vein with a focus upon food. The show consisted of three horizontal paintings: a 5-by-14-foot diptych from 1998 The Great Palindrome Still Life; a 1999 triptych titled The Biggest Pantry--Dawn, Noon, and Night, roughly 7 by dint of 15 feet; and The Large Vanitas with Holbein Quotation, a single 5-by-7-foot canvas from 1999 a nod to the distorted cranium in Holbein's Ambassadors.

The frighteningly bountiful paintings, overstuff with shellfish, roasting meats, hanging hams and garlands of sausages, are a collision between a Rockwell Thanksgiving, The Wizard Of Oz and the marginalia of illuminated manuscripts--monkeys, flora, cats and birds. Everything is painted in the manner of writing of a '70s album cover

In The Biggest Pantry triptych, our view is from inside a pantry looking without on three landscapes, or rather individual landscape seen at different times of day. The panel depicting dawn, the greatest in quantity normative, is yellow-violet, as an archway uncloses out onto a red-orange sunrise. Fish mount out of a yellow tank and transform into artichokes and then into violet wallpaper, as more fish, ovums and bread crowd the tables. The noon show resembles a mad butcher's store A flayed, cow, grilling steaks, lobster and sausage links rise without of a crimson floor, below a sunlit countryside visible end a large window in a virid wall. The opened watermelons gaze wounded. Night is a cerulean room engulfed in orange flames with more bring into view carcasses and champagne.

The Great Palindrome diptych gives visual form to the eponymous literary device: the sum of two units canvases splay outward in opposing perspectival views, depicting almost mirror images of a seaside picnic. An overflowing circular table is embedded in a bright orange and golden ground plane. Everything is tilted upward, as if the painting were upheaving its contents--more fish, fruit and meat--at the viewer.

These bizarre works immediately grab you with their bright color, large size and crampacked busyness, on the other hand the details overwhelm the compositions. Each painting hangs upon a device: a distorted brain-pan that when seen from the far left is corrected, the "palindrome" or shifting times of day. The works lack narrative mode of building and the potentially captivating imagery is painted uniformly in web weight and color. McGarrell trys us with perverse and violent fables, then leaves us hanging.

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