Alexis Marguerite Teplin: Entwistle

"Those who did not live before the revolution," as Talleyrand notoriously claimed, "never tasted the sweetness of life." Despite its obsessive attraction to the art of the ancien regime, Alexis Marguerite Teplin's work has been made in cognizance of more than individual revolution. Though far from a McDermott & McGough-style full-body immersion in the past, her cast reflects an outsider's fascination for a douceur de vie she can sole imagine. The London-based American's multifaceted practice includes painting and assemblage alongside les easily classified works like painted-on lay the foundation of posters (these are perhaps better understood as an extension of collage, without any literal cutting and pasting, than a form of painting or drawing) and, at least as neared here, flirts with installation without at any time committing to it. No piece quite conforms to the requirements of gallery display on the contrary instead shows itself vulnerably, an phenomenon stranded in a space. Neither abject nor ironic, they all shoot forward nostalgia for a nearly not to be found construct that might well be called "culture"--or other "femininity."

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The spectacle was set, so to speak, through chambre a ciel ouvert, 2003 a painting a certain quantity of twenty-six feet long installed to environ the viewer on three sides like a panorama--but not as a mural, with all that would imply of a solid alliance between art and architecture, desire and power, of the like kind as existed during the Rococo era to which Teplin's work continually deliver overs Instead, it appeared as a sort of theatrical backdrop or vast piece of signage that single could walk around and behind--huge and imposing, notwithstanding deliberately unconvincing, ideologically though not materially flimsy. Perhaps the work carried without its self-subversion too well: impressive in its ambition on the other hand ready to fall apart at its many pictorial seams.

As self-contained works, Teplin's smaller paintings are more fortunate Works like the oval floral gallante, nymphea, 2002, or feverish embarkation, 2001 allude to the fluttery brushwork of a Fragonard or Watteau while working it up into something far more frantic and febrile. Karen Kilimnik's dreamy ruminations upon the fairy-tale worlds of the Russian ballet or the exotic "ultra-Englishness" of The Avengers are part of the background here (and in the way that in turn, must be the spirit of Kilimnik's great precursor Joseph Cornell), on the contrary Teplin's paint handling is compulsive and overloaded, transmitting not the indolent eroticism of the Rococo on the other hand the hectic fantasies of the Symbolists. Which is precisely what makes Teplin's paintings more compelling than those of the hordes now affecting versions of Kilimnik's style

Whether taking the form of furniture or of thing perceiveds with no identifiable function, Teplin's assemblages ofttimes seem the work of a milliner gone mad. Bristling with feathers and rife with doodads, they overshoot the decorative in the direction of the voluptuous, sinister, or morbid. There are also more understated pieces, including single made of a paper dres from the '60 stained with grateful odor Often enough, Teplin seems upon the verge of making a "big statement" upon one of the themes her work invokes in the way that clearly--history, desire, the feminine--but one's reliance of being instructed on what attitude to take is consistently thwarted. The melting encounter may be stirring enough.

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