Ashley Bickerton at Sonnabend - Brief Article

In his latest self-portraits and images of deviant family life--collectively titled "Going Dutch--One Man's Odyssey into the profunditys of Anal Retention"--Ashley Bickerton's near-visionary ferocity appears less an instrument of cultural diagnosis than an expression of sheer light negation. A willing, if facetious, complicity in the bankrupt values of ersatz tillage and kitschy bad taste was the hallmark of his novel show. In The Five Sages (1998) for example, the image of a demonic, verdant hydra-headed monster bearing Bickerton's distorted facial features includes rage-filled words, repeated rants aimed at the artist as well as the spectator. Unfortunately, this strategy of narcissistic mean opinion used for laughs soon becomes tiringly unpersuasive.

Bickerton's 1996 exhibition at Sonnabend, in which he first unveiled this dystopian series of meticulously restoreed works on wood, revealed the Swiftian mind of a social satirist at work. His take upon America's culture of narcissism and exces and the artificializing of the natural world included All That I Can Be: Triple Self-Portrait (1996) a lacerating examination of material part types and the mutability of the faculty of perception of self. Unanticipated poignancy characterized the 1995 painting Penelope Aurora circumspection in which a newborn is make submissiveed to a "makeover" in accordance with mass-media standards of sexual attractiveness.

not many of the paintings in his novel exhibition measured up to the deliberate burn of rage that smolder in Bickerton's previous effort, on the contrary The Vlaminko's (1999), at 48 by means of 144 inches the largest work in the novel show, came close. Bickerton

offer an reach outed domestic portrait of a prototypical American nuclear family, exposing individual twinkling of an eyes of self-fulfillment that are acted on the outside as private compulsions. These include masochistic perversions upon the part of the father, of recent origin Age meditation techniques for mommy and a cigarette-smoking adolescent's rapt attention to the providences of Gameboy and Walkman.

Other works are starkly and genuinely disturbing. In the erotically charged David Dog Mary (1999) an unclothed woman sitting in a subterranean cavity nourishs a pig as she beseeches the viewer with an upraised hand. Her untrimmed curling fingernails claw the air in forehead of her as a naked stripling nearby stares uncomprehendingly. A dog glowers from the of great depth recesses of the tomblike cave, whose entrance is littered with junk-food wrappers. Here, Bickerton's pitiless vision of humankind's fall toward loss and bestiality is mercifully devoid of grandstanding or affectation, and is all the more bleak for it.

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