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Michael Madore at Phyllis Kind - New York - exhibition of the artist's work
Art in America, Oct, 2003 by Peter Gallo
Michael Madore's debut show at Phyllis Kind presented 26 paintings and drawings from the 1980s, and 44 small paintings on paper from the past two years. The early works feature funky narratives involving satellites, radios and Pop-culture characters, such as the Flintstones, depicted on intricately patterned zones of color. The pictures often include sections of text drawn from the literature of beautiful delirium, such as Anna Kavan's 1970 novel of addiction, Sleep Has His House. Madore's works from the late 1970s and early '80s easily fit into the trends of figurative painting at that time, from Pattern and Decoration and Chicago Imagism to Neo-Expressionism and the art scene of the East Village, where he lived from 1977 to '83.
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Through the years the artist's style has evolved into a manic, allover Day-Glo retinalism. Figures that suggest noir and alien-abduction movies, as well as comic books and 1950s medical manuals, wiggle in and out of view through color-charged fields filled with high-keyed linear webs. These webs consist of interconnected strands that look like illustrations of neurological or cybernetic circuitry. ABT 594 (Phase & Trials), 2002, is reminiscent of a page from one of Artaud's asylum notebooks, but with the color technologically cranked up. Along the bottom edge of the paper, a sleeping man with lovely features and a blue penumbra around his head--the test subject for some zany new psychotropic drug, perhaps--is visited by a red mummy-like figure that hovers above him to the right. Black rhizoid lines emerge from the head of the red figure, extending outward in all directions.
In I Am Held By The Round-about (2002), two similar men in white lab coats are surrounded by swarms of nerves, veins, organ parts, muscles and tendons. In the upper left quadrant, the colored matter seems to congeal into a third, rather ghastly apparition. Eye Raffle (2000) features a detective in the lower left of the picture looking toward the viewer through a magnifying glass. Above him, in a dense maze of nerves and gristle, hover disembodied eyes. This recent series, titled "Surge," all colored ink and mixed mediums on 19-by-26-inch sheets of watercolor paper, was exhibited in rows, creating the effect of a movie or television storyboard.
Madore's recent body of work falls into the same type of dystopian sci-fi tale of medical totalitarianism as 20th-century novelist Karin Boyes's prescient Kallocain. For Madore, medical and psychiatric subjection is a personal matter. He has endured a number of hospitalizations and, more recently, a gallery press release informed us, has been diagnosed with the latest "condition" to be entered into the Diagnostic and Statististical Manual of Mental Disorders, Asperger's syndrome, a form of autism. Although often exhibiting his work in "outsider" contexts, Madore completed the MFA program at Yale (a decision he made upon the advice of his psychiatrist while hospitalized in the late '80s in New Haven). His literary allusions are extensive, and I was reminded of the work of Jess, another highly literate "outsider." An important subject in contemporary art, medicalization and its discontents can be found in stylistically diverse bodies of work, from Madore to Vanessa Beecroft to Damien Hirst.
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