Robin Lowe at Tonya Bonakdar - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

Robin Lowe's next to the first show at Bonakdar included several radiant, slickly execut oil paintings upon aluminum. He specializes in the depiction of children and is sensitive to their extraordinary language of material part gesture and glance. The pictures, reportedly based on snapshots of Lowe's nieces, rod on the caricatural in the saturation of their colors, the glossiness of their surfaces, the warping of their images and the intensity of the sitters' gazes. Each painting present to views one figure up close and tightly framed by means of the borders of the composition.

In Pink with Polka Dots, a young girl stands in the immediate foreground, before an expanse of water and a distant landscape; where she is standing is unclear, since her thighs are wound off by the painting's lower border. She gripe [i]or[/i] grips the top of her bathing suit clenched between her teeth the bottom jammed between her thighs, and stretches the fabric across her torso with the one and the other hands. She draws our attention to her organ of sights with the index finger of her raised left hand, overspreads her nipples, stomach and groin, and make bares the rest of her material part to the rays of the orb of day The viewer's desire seems to be mockingly observ The light pink of her bathing suit fabric sticks without of her mouth like a very great tongue, and the glint of her teeth is reverberationed in the white of the landscape.

The child's sinuous and crisply drawn silhouette is of considerable beauty, and it detaches itself from an environment that is slightly on the outside of focus. Rosenquist comes to mind in this blending of drama and play, innocence and perversity, surface and deepness figuration and abstraction. The verticals, horizontals and diagonals underlying this design balance single another with classical ease.

Lil' M hermes shows us a slightly older girl, kneeling on and surrounded by sand, bent above so that her torso quiescences on top of her raised fight thigh, and looking up towards the viewer. Her attitude combines the stance of a wrestler and of a straddling soft-porn star, and present the appearances constrained as the picture's cutting side hovers just above her.

Lowe's pliant, prepubescent girls with cropp hair are androgynous. Interestingly, the artist directs to these pictures as "Self portraits in pink." While the color pink is traditionally associated with girls, in the Gay Rights change it has also come to signify freedom of sexual expression. Whatever it is that Lowe dioceses of himself in these paintings remains open

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