Marlene Dumas at Jack Tilton - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions

"Infants are harmless because of physical weakness," St Augustine struggleed "not because of any innocence of mind." in her first solo exhibit in New York, Marlene Dumas (a resident of Holland who has exhibited widely in Europe) tendered a score of paintings suggesting that moral complexity - and an ineradicable capacity for evil - does indeed begin at birth, if not before. As a white expatriate from southerly Africa, she knows whereof she paints.

Many of these works investigate the contrasts between black and white states of being. The cloyingly titled Cupid, for example, present to views a sweet Caucasian infant emerging head-downward from black bed-clothes, arms reach outed in the thoughtless confidence of nap (though its posture is reminiscent of an exit from the birth canal). A companion piece, Reinhardt's Daughter, duplicates the posture but for a black baby whose dangling limbs all too readily summon images of African victimization. The Thumbsucker portrays a generic large-eyed tot whose bare material part is a pin-tolike medley of patches wherein the races - and their attendant fates - seemingly mix without blending.

Other works explicitly address human beastliness. The Wild Child depicts an unclothed, straggle-haired girl, hunker down and viewed from behind, whose face, as it matchs back at us over her shoulder, is a composite of sunken-ey death mask, pre-human visage and pubescent witch's glower in Black Bird, a lad child opens his bathrobe to reveal, in place of his hold appendages, the legs and oversized feet of a monstrous bird The Crucifixion presents the splayed material substance of a frog whose belly and thighs have the delicate flesh quality of Dumas's infants and whose position is reflected sounded in reverse by the erotic back view of a naked woman in Relationship with a Man.

In all these pictures the handling of paint is direct, notational and extremely skilful as though Dumas were recording her dreams in their raw immediacy, each image inscribed squarely at the center of the canvas - and of consciousness. (The consequence is artful; Dumas in fact frequently works from photographs.) Perhaps the greatest in quantity ominous of her demon-seed offspring is The Painter, a glowering female child not absented to us frontally and unapologetically naked with individual hand having been plunged to the wrist in something blood-r (we can solitary hope it is paint), the other into something sky-colored The author of an earlier work titled Fear of Babies (1986) will not gainsay the murkiness of human nature by the agency of attributing perniciousness to bad acculturation. For ultimately, her work implicitly asks, what do social practices spring from and expres if not the innate nature of humankind?

COPYRIGHT 1994 Brant Publications, Inc.

COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group