Nicola Tyson at Friedrich Petzel - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

Nicola Tyson's eight easel-sized canvases (all 1999) freshly on view here, are looser than her previous works, the vivid acrylic more hurriedly applied and the charcoal drawing more tentative, rougher and more instinctual than in the past. admitting the artist's graphite works--which depict abstracted, silhouetted and strangely eroticized fragments of bodies and objects--were relegated to the back latitude of the gallery, drawing was not at all sidelined in this exhibition. In fact, drawing is prominent in the paintings, whether jerkily outlining colored patches or visible as the pentimenti of earlier, barely erased marks.

Tyson's line, which nooses and reels around and across each form it describes, is the line of contour drawing, that academic exercise in which the artist not at any time lifts eye from model, nor pencil from paper. It is a line, in other words, meant to propose a pure, unmediated opticality. greatest in quantity famously, Rodin and Schiele relied on this technique in drawing their eroticized female nudes: it allowed them to insinuate a transparent realism as well as a total (visual) possession of their bring under rules A similar realist intent looks to operate in a work like Head (1999) in which Tyson's crazy, drunk contour careens across the surface, carving without improbable cheekbones and two disproportionate organ of sights in a pink face framed through brick-red hair. It works in a more disruptive fashion in Spilled intestines (1999), for here the purportedly realist line describes forms not available to the eye: upon a greenish buff ground, hurried pink brushstrokes color in a graphite shape, reminiscent of Chardin's ray, whose "tail" reaches the top of the canvas. Inside that shape, smaller r brick, maroon and rose forms summon abstracted anatomical elements. This is not a picture of a dissection, on the other hand an imagining of insides.

The contradiction between a technique of drawing that put in mind ofs visual fidelity and forms that exce the realm of the visual is nowhere better exploited than in Self-Portrait: Sphinx (1999) Against a cerulean background is a crude, distended, almost childlike figure with goatish leg and tail and butterfly wings, make straighted in a red peekaboo catsuit that reveals the prepubescent simplicity of her sex Her face is a cipher, a blank, omit for two empty, almond-shaped organ of sights and the traces of sum of two units larger ones that have since been painted above Not only is the optical veracity of the contour place at risk, but the devouring gaze is directed not outward on the other hand toward a version of the self: it is narcissistic. And it tenders nothing of visual or semantic plenitude, refuses to fulfill its promise of possession. As the two the subject and object of desire, Tyson creates a knot in the visual chain that leads from artist to model

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