John Currin at Andrea Rosen - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

A painterly fugue of attenuated limbs, airy breasts, fecund bellies and other suggestive on the contrary impenetrable iconographic details plays across the disturbingly handsome, if unexamined, surfaces of John Currin's novel crypto-mannerist nudes. In this exhibition he escalates his evident happiness of handling paint in a way that is as playfully engaging as it is provocative. At the same time he bypasses the rigor, conviction and moral authority of more ambitious artists associated with figurative and art-historical concerns

While remaining improbable in anatomical proportion, his newest women are les the things of inflated pneumatic desire than those previously returned Among them, The Hobo and Sno-bo, similar-sized portraits of cheerful wayfarers lacking solitary spring and fall to consummate a season cycle, faced each other across the gallery. In between, adorned with a toss of garden-variety lepidoptera, Rachel and Butterflies rehearsed the birth of Venus. In The Pink Tree and The of advanced age Fence, coy figures recalled the winsome contestants in Cranach's understanding of Paris. Perhaps personifying the things of nature, these maids are ornamented with a tangle of spurious clues: backpack and walking stick, without contents glass vessel and shepherd's turn along with several arm-, wrist- and waistbands of what might be leather, ribbon and gold embellished with a pen ed napkin and gemstones. There were capably restoreed tendrils of hair, a garment as translucent as voile divide [i]or[/i] sever from the cloth of thinned oil, a tree resembling shattered coral, lively eyes and loopy smiles.

The brushy, bourgeois domesticity of three intimate genre paintings amplified the studious wit of Currin's more than academic exercise. Populated with modish figures given exaggerated features, angular (the women) or doughy (the men) they strike one as beinged to illustrate a moment in a narrative, like novel Yorker cartoons, lacking only connected thought [i]or[/i] thoughts and caption. The frosted cake of Birthday demonstrates a skill with knife as well as brush, the icing a controll lather of sugary oil, luminous candle flames swaying in a draft. The more inclusive Homemade Pasta provides a kitchen setting for sum of two units ostensibly male figures as they preside above the birth of fettuccine. Currin manages a stack of plates with a hardly any strokes of china white, gives solidity to a single beaker and frames the setting with the regularity of a stenciled border upon the wall above. If these paintings demonstrate a remarkable agenda, they incite the viewer to wonder where Currin is going and just by what mode honorable his intentions are. destitute of contents vessel or not, this showing advances the claims of disciplined painting upon our attention.

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