Christian Vincent at Forum - Brief Article

Art in America, Oct, 2001 by Gerrit Henry

At first glance, the contemporary paintings that 35-year-old, California-based Christian Vincent's work most resembles are those of Odd Nerdrum, the grab-you-by-the-eyes realist who is his Forum stablemate. The dark, rich tones are similar, yet Nerdrum's pensive Nordics evidence a sharp difference in sensibility from Vincent's brash and bemused businessmen. More importantly, Nerdrum's painterly emotions are interior and snowbound, while Vincent's are more extroverted and firelit.

Vincent has also been compared with Edward Hopper, and there does seem to be a shared American light and expert technique. But, for me, the artist Vincent most closely resembles is not a painter at all but the early- to mid-20th-century novelist Sinclair Lewis. Like Lewis, with his knowing savagings of all things American, Vincent is, at bottom, a social commentator. If Vincent's points are not as sharply drawn as Lewis's, nor his moral outrage as neatly presented, he shares with the author of Babbitt a deep and perplexed love of his country worked out in a melodrama of purely native characters and situations.

In Vincent's work, the clothes and settings are nonspecific 20th century, and there is plenty of aborted narrative. This is particularly notable in the giant oil-on-linen triptych, Cockfight (1999). On the side panels, curving architectural moldings loom above business-suited men clutching martinis and scraps of paper. In the central panel, elevated on an unseen platform, two youthful boxers are beating the hell out of each other as a group of seated and standing men watch from all sides, those directly before them silhouetted by the light on the fighters. Vincent's title leaves enormous room for doubt as to the nature of the fight (no roosters are in sight); the genteel setting and the impacted violence shout the artist's feeling about such dubious athletics.

A centerpiece of this exhibition was Rite of Spring (2000), the title shared with a Stravinsky ballet that got violently booed at its premiere in 1913. In Vincent's version, both real and surreal, at stage's edge members of the orchestra try to bear their alarmed, fallen conductor, while blackbirds carry off sheets of music into a painted backdrop of a dawning sky.

Every moralist painter from the Renaissance on has had his Icarus. Vincent's is losing feathers as he glides into a placid, even welcoming sea. But the artist turns to the classics less than he makes classics of the modern. Fatigue and guilt can be read all over the face of a man in a suit seated beside a chest of drawers, staring at his own face in the mirror atop the dresser, briefcase at his side on the floor, a telltale woman's leg, bare, at the edge of the bed nearby. In this 2000 work the man is caught One Foot Out of a shoe--in adultery, perhaps. Nothing much, we sense, to write home about, although perhaps enough to cry about later. Like so many social commentators before him, the gifted Vincent makes a strong case for examining what's going on around us.