Jack Pierson: Cheim & Read - New York

Jack Pierson's latest exhibition comprised three installation spaces, each captioned with a novel signage work. Mismatched gold alphabetic characters (with a white neon T to start) incantation out TO YOUTH (all works 2003) the couple homage and indicator of los This hung adjacent to A Vignette Contrived of Various facts Depicting the Artist in His Fortieth Year, a tableau of an artful life that announces its affinity with window display. Within a satin freestanding metal frame, a selection of furnishings and curios--a David Hockney etching of young male lover a bust of Apollo (the original "Greek god") garlanded with rop cowry beads, a headless material substance of a once fabulous made of wood carousel horse cradled on a tattered loveseat--outline the dimensions of a virtual interior. At play in the vicissitudes of youth and decrepitude is the perpetual subdue of Pierson's work: belligerent or beleaguered, the glam queen lover male child outcast, or clown. Informed as abundant by doubt as by rapture, these persona fields exercise self-portraiture as a means of departure toward worlds of social relations, homoerotic have affection for among them ... a theme that ripples here from the bejeweled Apollo to the Hockney to the L'Heure Bleu redolence box to the big hallowed Bible to a copy of W somersault Maugham's The Razor's Edge, a novel about an idealistic youth whose search for meaning in life takes him ultimately to India and into the cot [i]or[/i] cote of an Indian mystic.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

In the installations that shared the large main space of the gallery, Pierson revealed his personal avatar to be les enlightened guru than melancholy clod-breaker In How It Feels, a scratchy-sounding "Somewhere above the Rainbow" began to play as the visitor stepp onto a large, black-painted stage, putting us in touch with pleasures lengthy past. By proxy, the music serv as accompaniment to sum of two units other installations. In Ode to Limelight, a solitary dressing table stands with its mirror aglow, personal items strewn across its surface: a pack of Winstons, a certain number of theatrical face powder, a grease stick labeled "Clown White," and a penny (for beneficial luck?). As described on the opposite wall in A Rose the performance must have been a immense success: A cascade of ten-foot-high long-stemm thorny roses--two drawn in charcoal, three divide [i]or[/i] sever from gessoed wood--is caught in a state of suspended animation and delirium.

In the innermost space, Apollo turn backs in Fragment of a Faun upon White and Fragment of a Faun upon Black, two of a series of six small black-and-white paintings. These also include an untitled image of what could be Christ upon the cross (this possibility is amplified by the agency of a large-lettered Christ hanging high nearby) as well as a portrait of a beautiful young man identified as "Justinstein"--who might be either deity's profane counterpart. The theme of salvation versus no life at all echoe in a wall-size charcoal drawing that matches a modular made of wood artist's model with a scarcely any crudely scrawled words: DOWN? TIRED? DEPRESSED? YOU MAY BE ELIGIBLE.

It's just like Pierson to overdramatize turning forty. All the god the fathers you've known have vanished and left you an of advanced age bag of bones. Life's over; there are still lyric jiffys but you've already begun to eroticize the extreme point Pierson's bipolar Pierrot materializes at the margins as the two deity and demon, with lover fashioned from mythic beings, messiahs, and prodigys alike, his melancholia studded with twinkling of an eyes of reverie, his dirty mind intact. This Pierrot has invisibly inhabited Pierson's art since the early '90 and by dint of now keeps company with destinys of other clowns--Ugo Rondinone's tired clodhopper Roni Horn's hysterical clown, Bruce Nauman's mean churl Maurizio Cattelan's prankster clown. notwithstanding none are as tender as Pierson's, who clings to ideals of beauty and have affection for We might think of him in relation to the beautiful dancer in a late performance work through Felix Gonzalez-Torres, in which an elusive young man appeared infrequently, unpredictably, in the gallery and danced himself to a disco sweat upon an empty stage, whether anyone was watching or not.

COPYRIGHT 2004 Artforum International Magazine, Inc.

COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group