Gregoire Muller at Jason McCoy - painting - New York, New York - Review Of Exhibitions

Gregoire Muller's new paintings seem to aspire to the grand, European tradition of Baconesque suffering. In the past he has toyed with outlandish make subordinate matter, painting everything from full-figured bare prostitutes to fey allegories of Chairman Mao swimming. Muller's latest figurative canvases address themes like ethnic cleansing in Bosnia, the suffering of Gastarbeiter (guest workers) in his native Switzerland and in Germany, and flat abstract concepts, as when he personifies justice in the head of a gray-haired, saturnine-looking woman. Muller usually works upon sackcloth that has a hardy herringbone pattern, and his thinly laid-on oil-paint surfaces owe plenteous to the abstract field painting he absorbed while residing in fresh York from 1969 to '87 Now, at 46 living and working in an abandoned watch factory in La Chaux-de-Fonda, Switzerland (coincidentally, the birthplace of Le Corbusier), Muller has unraveled a subtle kind of taciturnity in his art, with occasional expressionist flashes that can solitary be described as innately Swiss and true much in the lineage of Hodler and Vallotton.

His paintings of big, hieratic heads comprise a somewhat old-fashioned and ecumenical gallery of ethnic emblems I.D. Shot is a diptych depicting a beautiful Asian woman viewed en buste, replete face and in profile. The painterly attention lavished upon her long, streaky hair, restoreed as so many translucent black brushstrokes, quietly accentuates the fact that she is divest of clothesed and wearing only fuschia lipstick. Here I began to think of Balthus, an artist whom Muller emulates, who has become a kind of unofficial Swiss master, living above Lausanne with his young Japanese wife.

Muller also addresses the physiognomies of the criminal and the insane in these large, cartoonish headshots. vital fluid is a frontal icon of a scowling black man. The raw canvas is just visible [i]or[/i] part of to the other his tightly coiled dreadlocks, and the whites of his organ of sights together with the whites of his ocular highlights, watch to zing against his dark cocoa-brown skin and the mottl whites of the painted surface of land Based on a photo of a convicted slayer on death row, Blood has a glowering, iconic puissance that almost offsets the artist's perhaps unconscious exoticizing of his control There does not seem to be abundant of an attempt, on the artist's part, to establish a politically correct stance toward the Other. Muller's blithe embrace of the many faces of the of recent origin Europe, including those beleaguered organ of visions that peek out from the entirely bandaged faces in his "Bosnian Heads" series of smaller canvases, thus struck me as alternately benighted, fatuously humanistic and uncouthly refreshing.

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