L.A. Portraiture: Post-Cool

Art in America, Oct, 1999 by Michael Duncan

Like Bamber's father portraits, Amy Adler's works propose an intense and unsettling variant of Photo-Realism--one that attempts to undermine the power of the camera. Adler makes drawings of photographs or sections of photographs, using a computer to insert her hand-drawn passages into new, amalgamated photographic images. In recent works, this distancing device helps the artist to analyze and reclaim troubling incidents from her past.

Her five-part series "What Happened to Amy?." (1996) consists of light sepia-colored photos of pastel drawings of photographs taken of a sultry, adolescent Adler by an older man. Artifacts of what Adler had been told was a modeling audition, the images coyly document her pubescence, presenting her in self-consciously childlike poses at a playground. Throughout the series, she remains in eye contact with the viewer. The drawings' sketchy lines and even-handed shadings reduce the portraits to ghostly presences, reflecting the artist's now more detached reassessment of both her sexual awakening and its portrayal by a nearly forgotten older man.

A more recent sequence of 10 photos, "Once in Love with Amy" (1997), alters sexually charged photos taken of the artist at 19 by a female lover. In these shots, set around a suburban fireplace and living room, the artist has replaced photographic images of herself with hand-drawn ones in pale colors. The sketchily composed Adler undresses, poses nude and stretches out splayed on a tabletop, passively basking in the desire of the photographer. Contrasting with the C-print background settings, Adler's hand-drawn flesh seems displaced, creating an odd, unsettling tension. By subverting the documentary status of the original photographs, Adler is able to reconsider her role as a subject, accepting her exhibitionism, passivity and past sexual experience with a kind of neurotic grace.

The recent portrait project of painter John Sonsini, whose previous body of work was spun out of the fantasy-laden poses and getups of gay male erotica from the 1950s and '60s, trumps photography in a different way. In the '80s, after his fourth solo show of Neo-Expressionist paintings, Sonsini temporarily dropped out of the art world to paint scenery for AMG, one of the West Coast's chief male erotica studios. After the death of AMG photographer Bob Mizer, Sonsini began to make paintings using live models posed in costumes and sets that he had inherited from AMG [see A.i.A., Mar. '96]. Models dressed as sexually available farmhands, grass-skirted natives and marines and cops in parade uniform display themselves in dramatic, off-kilter poses, their physicality heightened by Sonsini's thick painted surfaces and weighty brushwork.

Sonsini's newest work, however, eschews costumes, poses and overt narrative to zero in on a single model named Gabriel. For the past two years, Sonsini has worked with him full time in the studio, making paintings that demonstrate a complex curiosity about his subject, piqued by erotic interest. In stripping homoerotic desire of both irony and the cultural trappings of any specific time and place, Sonsini has intensified his work, asserting the power of portraiture as a communicative device.