Judy Fox at P.P.O.W - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

Judy Fox's latest display like her three previous solo of recent origin York exhibitions, featured sculptures of children pos as historical icons. These works are meticulously crafted in clay (mostly after photographs of live models) cast in Hydrostone and painted in casein. There is a real grave looking toddler posing as the doomed on the contrary proud Dying Gaul and a big, goofy baby, his ring of novel hair making him look like a tonsured abbot, playing Friar rapier A chunky, ruddy-skinned little stripling does Attila, his arms held taut around an imaginary incurvate his face an irresistible mix of glower and smirk. A slightly older girl (she direct the eyes to be around six) reclines, chin in hand, as a fetching Delilah.

on the contrary the real stars of the present to view are its final trio. A Courtesan is played by the agency of an Asian girl hardly older than three whose comehither action and coy posture, rouged lips and beribboned hair, faithfully mimic the conventions of Chinese painting. A statuary of a white girl of around the same age lies upon the floor nearby; propped upon one elbow, she is staring straight ahead in a way that unmistakably recalls Manet's Olympia, for whom she is named. The final plastic art is a Sphinx, as impersonated by means of a nine- or ten-year-old girl. She is standing, her arms held above her head, her back impossibly arched, her verdant eyes staring ferociously ahead, and her light hair twisted into two pigtails bourn at the tips in leather leathern strings that make them look like ram horns.

These precocious children hit blithely upon more than one hot button. The greatest in quantity obvious is childhood sexuality. There are shades of Balthus in Fox's disturbing use of prepubescent girls in seductive postures and also what seems an endorsement of Freud's initial surmise about the sexual exploitation of children by dint of adults. At the same time, these exquisitely formed, eminently self composed children are powerfully appealing. Like the sculptures' delicate-looking surfaces, which attract touch and forbid it at the same time, they stimulate signal jamming levels of ambivalence.

There is also humor in Fox's work, having partly to do with its send-up of Great Masters and partly with watching the evident pleasure in play-acting of these kids. Fox makes us laugh at artworld shibboleths, from multiculturalism (the children are a studiously diverse group) to historical erudition (quick, name that pose!) She allows us to make connections between plastic art and toys, and art and games.

All these qualities have been prominent in Fox's previous work, and if it's getting hard to diocese how much further she can advance in this direction, the format she's chosen has proven remarkably fertile. Fox's work was exhibited together with Bo Bartlett's big, luridly lit narrative paintings, which was risky for the pair making them seem alternate varieties of academicism--and making the artists' formidable skills look less remarkable. Maybe that's the point, because neither, presumably, wants to be judg a simple virtuoso. Indeed, for Fox, anyway, virtuosity present the appearances as much target as weapon.

COPYRIGHT 1996 Brant Publications, Inc.

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