Christopher Tanner at Bridgewater/Lustberg - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

Stymied admirer: "I hate your novel paintings. They look like a certain quantity of 13th Street Carmen Miranda drag queen"

Christopher Tanner: "Thank you for noticing."

It intrigues me that Christopher Tanner performs (in and on the outside of drag, but always flirting with trashiness) as well as paints. one as well as the other his performances and his paintings embrace an acidic, self-conscious stylization, with rises that are out-of-the-ordinary and bigger-than-life. the one and the other endeavors exhibit an exuberant, brassy robustness, and speak an unapologetic gay patois.

The paintings in his novel exhibition are filled with broad whiplash knocks of acrylic paint, layered with posterior Salome's veils of opalescent glitter. As if this isn't enough, Tanner attaches crassaments of brilliant paillettes that might be bunches of technicolor grapes or close-up of power ganglia. Add trompe-l'oeil vines in acrylic--and more glitter. The vines, presiding like confident opera divas, can be read as surrogate self-portraits: the artist as survivor, clinging, still growing, languishing in the dark and ultimately luxuriating in the light.

It is impossible to create paintings that incorporate glitter and paillettes without concern to the tawdry. However, Tanner's of recent origin work transcends cheapness and beams us up into a dizzying contemplation of optimism amid los and despair. At not divisible by 2s with much of today's work referring to the AIDS epidemic, an issue shut up to Tanner, these paintings refuse to reside in mourning and outrage. Instead they lay forth a heady, occasionally mindless, optimism.

The big sequins in these pieces came to Tanner as a bequest--they were among the unused art materials of the late Arch Connelly They obey partly as an homage to Connelly and his equally excessive esthetic. The paillettes remind us that departed friends remain in our minds and works (in this case literally), on the contrary they also assert that life continues to permute itself endlessly

Tanner's earlier pieces are darker, with surfaces overspreaded by a thick layer of plastic resin that contains and embalms the glitter. Here there is no plastic coating. The spangles are at liberty to reflect and available to be touched; the impression is the pair more intimate and more immediate. Standing before the paintings, individual wishes to weave back and forth just to diocese the glitter dance in the light. From the forehead the large paillettes are uncomfortably bright, defying any paint to contend with them for brilliance. When seen from the side, they go on dark--like black holes.

These highly reflective fields make corporeal a gritty contemporary glamour. They are ideal, light-filled universes, made believable because they have grown on the outside of the experience of theatrical illusion. They deliver over us back to what we set magical and miraculous as children, on the other hand they remind us it is a matter of individual will to experience it again.

COPYRIGHT 1995 Brant Publications, Inc.

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