Celeste Rapone at Corbett Vs Dempsey

Controlled Burn

Fifty-five years after the first Hairy Who exhibition, Imagism is still alive and well in Chicago - mostly thanks to talented young artists like Celeste Rapone ( b. 1985) who continue to apply strong design and evident precision to cartoonish figuration with a fresh, youthful attitude. Maybe it’s just the most accessible way for artists in their early career to assert themselves into a geriatric world that is as powerful and efficient as it is dysfunctional and corrupt.

Rapone’s gentle floating bodies recall the tubular figures of Gladys Nilsson. Throughout, there is the evident craft and charm of Barbara Rossi, though Rapone’s paintings, like a mural, command a room instead of just decorate a wall. There’s nothing caustic, threatening, or ironic here as one might find with the male Imagists. There’s just gentle, zany humor - with the urban sophistication that one associates with the life-style magazines that target young women. All of Rapone’s solitary figures are young women  (self portraits ?) and they have apparently just furnished their first apartment on the north side after growing up in DuPage County.

The apparent narrative is as shallow as check-out counter journalism, but as the artist has stated, these pieces began as non-figurative designs - and that is how they really stand out. They’re as bold, upbeat, eye catching, and inventive as the modernist posters commissioned for the London Underground (remember that cheerful show at the Art Institute in 2019?). Like those posters, these paintings promote life in the big city. Unlike those posters, however, these pieces have the exquisite close-up aesthetic that can distinguish paintings from prints. Every square inch is energized and alive with precision.

And perhaps the narrative is not all that upbeat after all. Rapone’s angular designs reach out to demand attention - but they also strongly pull inward - sucking the viewer into a sense of claustrophobia. Considering the year in which these pieces were made, we might call it cabin fever during the great Covid epidemic shutdown. The figures appear to trapped by the edges of the painting. They’re all bored - even when the boyfriend stops by. After sex - then what? Daydream about sailing an imaginary boat on an imaginary stream? 

  Spring Couple

Carmen Chami at National Museum of Mexican Art

 

 

 

If “Adlateres and the Unexpected Visit’’ ( The title piece of this exhibition - shown above ) is even slightly autobiographical, Carmen Chami is not especially happy about leaving Mexico. Immersed in iconic Mexican art, from the Baroque spirituality of Cristóbal de Villalpando (17th Century) to the surreal self dramatization of Frida Kahlo, she has neither the prankish humor nor the righteous social justice favored in Chicago.. And her work is visceral - the very opposite of the conceptual art still trending in university art departments. She paints, and presumably lives, entirely in a world of the spirit - a dark world illuminated by revelation rather than the sun. 

Zapata's Widows, as an Excuse

If her “intention is to make art that is completely universal" (as she asserts), then she is a spectacular failure - at least so far as this viewer is concerned. I have no idea, for example, what “Zapata’s widows as an excuse” is about - and there is no gallery text to explain it. What are those two, spread-eagled, interlocking young women doing? Is there some obscure legend about the wives of Emilio and his brother ? What about their behavior might serve as an excuse for anything? It hardly feels like a sexual interaction - It’s more like they are floating around in a dream - possibly their own. This painting is far more personal than universal.


Sadness, confusion, frustration, and anger seem to permeate the narratives in the show - but the vehicles that carry them are extraordinarily well made. Like the old masters, Chami composes figurative gesture simultaneous with graphic energy. So even when the subject is incomprehensible, the painting still feels so profound that the viewer is compelled to figure it out.

 

The Bad News

Her portraits, however,require no explanation, and there are several good ones - especially the self portrait titled “The Bad News”. Wow! What a painting! Possibly, for this artist, people do not exist except within intense moments of living. It’s the very opposite of treating the human body as still-life or clothes horse. Like Frida, she sees herself as suffering - inviting the viewer to share her most intimate moments. In her other great self portrait, the artist imagines herself as “Judith”, the Biblical heroine, who decapitates the enemy general who has taken her to bed. Grabbing her by the ankles, he is just about to drive home his point when - ooops - she cuts off his head with a handy sword. Our attention is drawn to the wild, cross eyed look that flashes across Chami’s (Judith’s) face. There are several great 17th century depictions of this gruesome scene - and Chami’s could hang right beside them.

Judith

As with Artemesia Gentileschi (a victim of rape) the exemplary story of Judith has served this artist well as a conflation of the deeply personal with the stridently political. Most of the other pieces, however, just have me admiring the artist’s virtuosity. “Incredulidad” (disbelief), presents a blind-folded woman touching the sternum of a reclining half naked man. It echoes Doubting Thomas when he touched the wounded chest of the resurrected Christ. The woman resembles the artist herself just as the man resembles the Holofernes mentioned above. But does this puzzling and apparently personal story really deserve such a luminous and complex pictorial space as well as the reference to sacred narrative? Where Frida’s self obsessions feel quirky - Chami’s feel ponderous.

Disbelief

The visual language of the 17th Century masters implies a universe of grand design and profound purpose. As applied in many of these paintings, that purpose is apparently to make humans miserable and there is certainly plenty of evidence from around the world to support such a belief.

 

 But you would have to be more depressed and fatalistic than I to accept it.

 

 

 

**************

 

 

Postscript:

 

My friend Misha Livshlultz has pointed out that there's no blood in Chami's version of Judith and Holofernes.  Not on the sword, not dripping from the head, not staining the sheets.  

One might conclude that the relationship here depicted is no more violent and abusive than the heterosexual act itself - which for some women might well be violent enough.

Pooja Pittie at Thomas Mccormick Gallery

 

 

 

Wanted to be elsewhere, but saw no way to get there

 

 

 

 

 Pooja Pittie is an outsider artist - not because she lives on the margins of society - far from it - but because her art is so much closer to herself than to the Artworld. Being self taught, her work appears untethered to any theory of art other than her own. She does not engage art history, she engages her viewers whom she treats like guests to her psychic home. As hostess, she wants us to enjoy ourselves. But she also wants us to experience the full force and drama of her life - a life that is slowly but surely ebbing away with a degenerative disorder.

These two intentions are not especially compatible as she begins to apply paint to canvas. Each piece represents a unique conflation and the contrasts have intensified since her last exhibit. The gay, floating, perforated ribbons of 2019 have been replaced by maudlin smears, much like tears streaking down a face caked with makeup. Her paintings are now weeping. Her challenge is to combine intensities of joy and sorrow.

Just in case the paintings don’t communicate what’s on her mind, she’s given them succinct and unambiguous titles like “I Wanted to be elsewhere but saw no way to get there”. Tragic as both title and image, it is the most lyrical and moving piece in the show. Long sweeping gestures break with sorrow as they approach the bottom of the canvas. Yet the graphic design of the piece remains strong - much like the cursive style of Chinese calligraphy. Pittie has that wonderful ability to see the whole with every mark she makes.

Often the pieces have too much frustration and despair to be redeemed by high spirits. Battle lost. Expressions of despair were, however, not uncommon among the heroes of the New York School. Every such cry is unique. With Jackson Pollock it was a mind racing through uncontrollable anxieties. With Milton Resnick it was an unshakably grim, depressing view of the world. With Pooja Pittie, it’s a cry of frustrated exhaustion. The artist, like a juggler, has thrown dozens of colorful balls into the air and there’s no way she’s going to catch all or even any of them. All of her crisp intentions seem to be melting simultaneously.

In one of her recent pieces, however, “Fields of Consciousness”, there’s no struggle at all - just a joyous eruption of reds, blues, and greens - like a Mid-Summer garden in full bloom. We might note, however, that this piece is not included in “Nothing Gold can Stay”, the foreboding title given to the current exhibition. I am hoping that eventually she will have enough of this kind of work for a show that would fit a title like “Strawberry Fields Forever”.

 

 Fields of Consciousness

*******

These Dreams are already Spoken For (2019)

(a piece from her previous show)