Jeff Koons at Gagosian - Beverly Hills - Brief Article

The ability of Jeff Koons to conflate raw feeling with the slickness of mass address continues in his new "Easyfunethereal" paintings. The imagery in this series of canvases is precisely rendered in modulated oil paint that has been applied "wet on wet." This is a technical advance from the hard edges of the earlier, endearingly clunky "Celebration" paintings of the late 1990s, which, viewers may recall, were exhibited alongside tinted, cartoonshaped mirrors. Like those earlier works, the "Easyfunethereal" series is based on photographic images that Koons assembles into collages and then copies onto canvas. The difference is that computer scanning and digital erasing has allowed the artist to manipulate the images in a freer, almost gestural manner.

The mood of dreamlike onanism that dominates these paintings is established by recurring images of fashion models who look like they have been scanned from a Victoria's Secret catalogue. Koons digitally erases their bodies, leaving ghostly dancing bikinis, bras and rhinestoned G-strings. Flesh does, however, make some appearances, as navels and disembodied fragments of cleavage float amid the background imagery of landscapes (deserts, mountain waterfalls, foamy seas) and food (mixed frozen vegetables, pancakes covered with topping).

In Elephants, at 10 by 14 feet the largest painting in the show, an outlined form of a crawling woman is at the center of the composition. With the exception of hair and black-leather hot pants, she has been erased; inside the void left by her absent body is the close-up imagery of elephants that gives the painting its name. A number of empty bikinis are posed across the foreground, not unlike Jackson Pollock's "cutouts." There's some strange visual interplay between the elephants' hides and the leather hot pants, hinting at a thematic connection between sexual arousal and mortification of the flesh.

As with all the paintings in this show, the imagery of Elephants is a little dim and lacking in radiance. In a more conventional Pop-oriented painting, such dimmed color might be a detriment, but here it seems to underline the mysterious, elemental rumble of desire beneath the surface of the work.

COPYRIGHT 2001 Brant Publications, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2001 Gale Group