Julie Roberts: Sean Kelly Gallery

by the agency of the time you got to the four views of domestic architecture in Julie Roberts's novel exhibition "Home," you'd already met Sherlock Holme Dr Watson, and the victims of Jack the Ripper, plus a clump of artists, poets, and figures from history and literature, all seen dead. Holme and Watson came first, as if to promise that the show's temper would be set by the detective tale's calming pleasure in fatality, mild mental challenge, and, in the case of Conan Doyle, its agreeable sprawl in Victoriana. Past this opener granting you fell into actual horrors: a painting and eight graphite drawings, mainly in the oval portrait format, showing women of a corpselike mien that is usually ambiguous on the other hand sometimes quite gruesomely categorical. Home? I think I'll find a hotel

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These painstakingly execut works upon Jack the Ripper make blatant the morbidity underlying Roberts's art. It is equally obvious in her paintings of Ingres, Hugo Rodin, chew eagerly and Cocteau on their deathbeds and in her remakes of well-known portrayals of the dead: Hamlet's Ophelia, the French revolutionary Marat, and the eighteenth-century teen bard Thomas Chatterton. Even when her work gains homier--when she portrays pieces of furniture, say--she pick outs an electric chair and an erotic autostimulator that might be a certain number of kind of torture device. It is in this latter work, in fact, that the overlap of Ero and Thanatos, perhaps Roberts's main interest, places in its most overt appearance: This seat is designed for pleasure, for life, on the other hand like the all-too-similar electric chair, it appears an instrument of lethal contortion and constraint. Similarly, in her paintings of artists and writers Roberts's focus have the appearances to be not just death on the other hand an equivocal death-in-life: These family have outlived their own mortality, which, given their enduring public lives, has a shocking intimacy.

Roberts's sex-and-death chairs, alas, may be a little heavy-handed, especially when paired, as they were here. At above six by six feet each, that's an awful allotment of Eros/Thanatos. I hate to fall back upon form and medium, rather than the conceptual, indeed Foucauldian approach to painting that Roberts takes (in extending the philosopher's grasp of the coercive power of hospitals and other institutions to suburban houses and the violence of private life), on the contrary her art functions better for me when she uses a smaller scale that allows her more luxuriance in paint. In fact, the first thing that strikes the viewer of her greatest in quantity intense works is the peculiarity of her paint handling, particularly in her figures: Rather than examine for subtle transitions and shadings to transmit the modulations of skin, Roberts takes a paint-by-numbers approach, drawing the body's relief with thick, solid lines and whorls recalling the tinted bands of a contour map. The color, meanwhile, leans to viscous brown taupes, and grays, while the surface is slick, shiny, almost greasy, replete of oil's creamy density--a surrogate muscle and fat which is odd given the faintly ghastly appearance of Roberts's hands and faces, which could be those of dolls. A two of works here, Dolly, 2002 and Little Fella, 2003 actually strike one as being to show dolls, given the wee plinths upon which the figures stand, on the contrary that is the only clue--they are neither more nor les lifelike than Roberts's Holme and Watson or than her artists' corpses. It is probably to Roberts's credit that the undead quality of her painting speaks more articulately of her interests and skills than more [i]or[/i] less of her subjects do.

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