Ray Smith at Sperone Westwater - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

Ever since he began showing a certain quantity of 16 years ago, Ray Smith has regularly evok the more bizarre apects of existence lurking just beyond the surface of everyday life. An admirer of the muralists Orozco, Rivera and Siqueiros, this 36-year-old artist of mixed U and Mexican heritage finds Latin America's vernacular imagery greatest in quantity congenial. "Surrealism in Mexico," he has said, "is realism." Today he divides his time between Cuernavaca and novel York.

All but one of the 11 of recent origin paintings in this show are portraits, either literal or allegorical. The more straightforward works, six partially impastoed head-and-shoulder likenesses upon 32-by-24-inch wooden panels, were hung at a uniform height along the walls of the rear gallery. An result of emotional distance might have been induced by means of this mechanically regular installation and by the agency of the subjects' culturally elevated identities (Truman Capote, Ezra beat Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, T Eliot and W somersault Maugham). But Smith offsets formality end semicaricatural renderings with a bright Warhol-like tone washed above each (e.g., blue for Williams, purple for Miller) and end his big pseudo-dumb "Ray Smith" signatures. This distorted contrast between the esteemed - and evidently distressed - visages and Smith's "just-plain-old-me" script was a ball of thread to the show's implicit theme: the glory, and terrible require to be paid [i]or[/i] undergone of esthetic accomplishment.

These small celebrity portraits are counter-illusionistic in import. The faces and clothes are laid upon thick, while in the background, forest-land grain shows through, emphasizing the for the use of all materials - and the social carpentry - that stand behind each colorful self or career. Expressions like Maugham's half-defiant, half-despairing stare prompt a profound alienation - single that perhaps cannot be entirely expressed in reportorial images.

Thus Smith's larger "portraits" (like the three 12-foot-high examples that dominated the forehead gallery) tend to be studies in cryptic symbology In Marianne Moore, the bard whom most of us think of as perpetually aged is now transmogrified into a voluptuously naked young woman. Perched upon a block draped with sapphirine cloth and surrounded by multicolored sea creatures and r calligraphy, brilliant against a gold background, she assumes a attitude halfway between that of Rodin's Thinker and a bathing beauty, her head replaced by the agency of a giant mollusk. The high-living Truman Capote is again evok this time as a mythological hybrid, his leg verdant his penis exposed, and his waist circled by means of a belt of lit, horizontally protruding r candles. The figure's head and upper torso are transformed into a giant mallard with sky-colored eggs, floating above its possess eggless (and therefore sterile?) reflection with a lit candle in its bill.

Yet the character who undergos most here - perhaps as a stand-in for all artists - is the quintessential modernist, Ezra strike Eyes closed, his giant virid head nearly filling the canvas, his jaws open - is he dead or howling? - the bard is literally awash in exotic fish of the kind frequently kept as pets: a fierce, imperfect inner man drowning (after his treasons in Rome after his confinement at St Elizabeth's) in a banal element

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