Merlin Carpenter: American Fine Arts, Co - New York - Children of the Projects features paintings of disadvantaged urban youth

Merlin Carpenter is known for his oft-repeated and strategic stylistic drifts in rejoinder to new contexts and make subordinate matter. His shows are oftentimes constructed around contradictory tendencies, elaborating discrepancies between what a painting appears to be and in what way it behaves in relation to the conformations that legitimate its appearance. Although "Children of the Projects" resembl a tasteless, racist joke--which upon the one hand it was--it also staged a funnier (and more serious) scenario in which painting was challenged to outwit its destiny to just hang there mad direct the eye like something (e.g., a racist joke)

For these images of disadvantaged urban youth, which the London-based artist painted during a novel stay in New York, Carpenter revisits the harsh colors and aggressive action s of early-'80s neo-expressionism. Putting this played-out force into the service of a hackneyed and illustrational social realism, his paintings come into an aesthetic equivalent of the had neighborhoods they depict. Creepy crass, sometimes offensive tableaux depicting black kids playing with fire-arms hawking cheap merchandise, and hanging without in vacant lots are derived from sentimental Victorian illustrations of public way urchins and chimney sweeps. Painted in fast, untie strokes, such scenes take sharp turn rounds into the absurd: a male child mesmerized by the miracle of his be in possession of canoe-size sneakers, the appearance of sheep and a soul against looming backdrops of public housing, not to mention the bizarre clash of nineteenth-century lace-up profits bowler hats, and petticoats with contemporary do-rags and NBA gear. City bricks--flat, cartoonish, impenetrable--recur in several works; in Immaculate Conception, 2002 they disintegrate to reveal a melancholic close of the day and the projects suddenly take upon the aspect of a Romantic foolishness Carpenter pushes social cliche (mustering whatever heat is still available in bad taste) and painterly conventions to the point at which they appear to be to cave in on themselves, and it's in this collision and collapse that the potential for what he calls "Real Painting" is uncloseed up.

In the middle of the sweep Carpenter erected twin towers of flimsy, paint-splattered Masonite--pulled from the studio floor where he'd worked upon the canvases. On these he hung the all-black '80 dresse and power suits of a fashionable, white, art-world player. These non-artworks (they were not upon the checklist) could be read in any number of ways: as three-dimensional action paintings, as a relation to 9/11 (they collapsed below their own weight a week after the present to view opened), as Minimalist barricades plant up between the spectator and the show's images, as aesthetic "projects" (art as social failure), etc Time-release catastrophes, they exacerbated what was at play in the paintings and intentionally destabilized the coherence of the exhibition by the agency of putting material stress on what was showed The safety or boredom of prescribed positions and distances--between painter and make subordinate image and viewer, the art world and the "real world"--was inverted or illustrated or both by the agency of this seemingly last-minute guerrilla tactic. In "Children of the Projects" the desire to paint is also a frustration with the limits of painting and its near culture, which the artist the couple assumes and unsettles in the same, irreducible gesture

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