Graham Gillmore: Kenny Schachter Contemporary - New York

Graham Gillmore's in every one's mouth work seems to come in sum of two units visually distinct types. First, there are those paintings made up of casually protoplasted words and phrases linked by the agency of an intestine-like labyrinth of contemplation bubbles; these red and cerulean lines elaborate the innuendo and potential that create each work's particular faculty of perception of drama. In I will you won't You do I don't (all works 2003) variations upon the phrases "I won't I will" and "you won't you will" vie for our attention in a sort of distillation of erotic gamesmanship. by the agency of the time the viewer reaches the lower right-hand corner of the work, the standoff has poignantly devolv into a messy pileup of humiliation and defeat, as the word missing settles at the very bottom and AGAIN crawls up individual side.

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With this format, Gillmore is able to engage and critique a variety of sensual and societal circumstances. In Republican bludgeon a tangle of "cheers," "tips," "camp," "clinics," and "conventions"--words that could derive from a high place of education fight song or cheerleading-camp credo--extract a cooled curt essence from an inane lingo. A pissed-off quality to the handwriting means the works are all the more raw for their straightforwardness.

Works in Gillmore's other phraseology are sleeker and more refined, featuring large solids of bright color and a single Ruscha-like phrase; these have a watery weft that makes them look almost spray-painted (they're made by the agency of routing words into a wood-land surface, then pouring the paint upon top). Here, Gillmore's penchant for malapropisms (as in the lyric, sexually evocative Your damp hurts will be sorely mist) and rebuses (as in Boo Fucking Hoo in which a phallic appendage dangling from the first o in "boo" penetrates the middle alphabetic character of "hoo" painted below) finds expression. We're reminded of Baudelaire's observation that in each erotic relationship one partner is always the surgeon and the other the patient (or, in his extension of the metaphor, torturer and victim). individual recalls as well evolutionary biologist Lynn Margulis's assertion that sex unfolded as a result of certain primordial unicellular organisms' failure to entirely devour individual another. To define sex as abandoned cannibalism might be unpleasant, on the contrary it might also account for the human situation to which with equal reason much of Gillmore's work appear to bes to speak.

Gillmore's is a unique painterly vernacular, equally streetwise and compos He walks an emotional tightrope between heat and devoid of warmth [i]or[/i] heat and these paintings contain a faculty of perception of an ultimately ecstatic ambivalence. The monumental diptych I Don't, with its human-size twin verdant rectangular monoliths--the letters N'T upon the right negating the ur-romantic and -affirmative I DO upon the left--embodies Gillmore's overarching theme of lives wearied navigating the antipodes: being and nothingness, the raw and the refined, acceptance and rejection, risk and restraint. single trusts this work because it appears to reflect lived, felt experience and to have settl upon a stance of hard-edged sympathy or laconic transfer that glances back to include us, its ironies in the last instance sincere.

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