L.A. Portraiture: Post-Cool

Art in America, Oct, 1999 by Michael Duncan

In three large, masterful paintings that dominated his recent exhibition at the Dan Bernier Gallery in Los Angeles, direct eye contact connects Gabriel with the viewer at the same time that it reflects the bond between artist and model. Simply dressed or nude, posing seated on a low twin bed in a sparse bedroom set, Gabriel faces the viewer with eyebrows furrowed and head thrust attentively forward. Unabashedly celebrating his medium's expressive power, Sonsini builds Gabriel's shoulder, lips, eyebrows and hair with thick dabs and swatches of oil paint, reflecting the sheen of light on his body. In a manner that brings to mind the portraiture of, say, Soutine or Alice Neel, Sonsini also introduces slight distortions into his hypercharged renderings, at times aggrandizing the figure's hands, ears and feet to heighten the portraits' impact. In addition, he varies his model's demeanor from one work to another, showing him in attitudes that range from innocent to ominous. This cumulative portrayal allows the viewer's sense of the subject to deepen as the series progresses.

The Gabriel paintings depict gay desire in a way that seems considerably more open, subtle and connected than is usual in such explorations of homoeroticism. The depth of these paintings, however, comes not from any celebration of identity politics but from their success as expressive, desire-haunted portrayals of a specific individual.

Some L.A. portraitists work not from autobiography or the model but from their own mental image of historical or fictional characters. With their gnarly, expressionistic surfaces, Keith Sklar's painted reliefs find an appropriately weird, embodied form for their offbeat subject matter. In a technique that he calls "reverse trompe l'oeil," Sklar paints in oil on top of rough surfaces collaged with latex-paint casts of found objects--plastic cowboys, cartoon characters, lumpy figurines and the like--that he has glued to the canvas. When scrutinized from the right position, the painted depictions of iconic figures from history or the entertainment world seem to pop out from their rough-hewn, stewlike fields. While clearly indebted to Julian Schnabers plate paintings and Viola Frey's ceramic amalgamations, Sklar's work is unusual in the way it utilizes three-dimensional grounds for illusionistic effects.

Perhaps Sklar's most poignant paintings to date are three 1997 portraits of the actor Bert Lahr as the Cowardly Lion in The Wizard of Oz. Clearly intended as surrogate self-portraits, the works depict the character amid an alarming mess of images, lumps and colors. In his blustering, mock-ferocious manner, the Lion seems to be daring the viewer to question his authority as a painted icon. In the first of these paintings, a bubbled form painted to resemble a couple of fried eggs appears on the character's forehead, with a cartoon chicken (for cowardice) looming above. With his single female breast, Lahr's character seems a hermaphroditic, all-encompassing, comic life force who nurtures form out of chaos. Like the Cowardly Lion--who learns in Oz that he is not lacking in "nerve" after all--Sklar rallies his courage to make wildly unfashionable, celebratory reliefs that demand eyes-on, contemplative viewing.