Susan Hauptman at Forum - Brief Article

Continuing with her signature control Susan Hauptman's nine large self-portrait drawings in her first exhibit at the Forum Gallery are mesmerizing. Compell by means of Hauptman's pensive visage, which in the way that intently confronts the viewer, and seduc by means of her mastery of charcoal and pastel, a singular fusion of photographic realism and textural finesse, we are drawn into her meditation and to the facts with which she figures her self-representation. The dominant theme of these works, all from the last three years, is her sex and correspondingly, her relation to the male neighborhood which accompanies her in various ways.

As if to calculator her facility for conjuring verisimilitude, Hauptman exercises a strategy that accentuates artifice. The faces are powerfully modeled and closely observed--wrinkles, under-eye circles, grimace lines and all--while the bodies are evenly generalized. This discrepancy evokes a head thrust end a hole in a board above a flatly painted figure, as at a fairground. As in earlier works, Hauptman's costumes--a ruffl dres a grass skirt, a retro beaded sweater--suggest different personae. Sporting buzz-cut hair and a strapless black cocktail dres that reveals disentangleed biceps, she offers a radically tilted cake ostentatiously white-frosted with swirls and gold leaf. An upside-down male head floats above the cake. In another drawing, Hauptman's sober countenance contrasts with her airy satin bow, recalling Watteau's melancholic clodhopper Gilles. She holds the hand of her male companion below a windowsill containing a vase decorated with pairs of stout berries.

The catalogue essay identifies the man as the artist's husband, writer Leonard support With his sometimes fragmentary appearance in all nine self-portraits, and with allusions to a masculine nearness in the two smaller still lifes also upon view, the compositions become portraits of the artist in marriage. There can be conflict, as when the man's black-gloved hand makes the sign of a fire-arm and points toward Hauptman's exaggeratedly protruding ear. Frowning and wearing a mannish argyle sweater, she sits at a table bearing an ornamental vase decorated with an embracing brace and a plate with a dark ring and radiating marks that put in mind of the pain of a stretched orifice. What a choice! Elsewhere, framed by the agency of frilly kitchen curtains and wearing a gauzy embroidered dres Hauptman grasps at her waist a bulbous vase that is tinted celadon (the sole color in the picture) and features the man's black-and-white profile. Her expression is almost grim, plane as he is symbolically filling her, occupying her matrix Hauptman's complex consciousness of herself as an artist/maker and woman/wife challenges us to direct the eye as closely as she does.

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