Stephane Pencreac'h at Anne de Villepoix

In his recent exhibition "Sublimation: Life during War," French artist Stephane Pencreac'h conjured captivating meditations on sex and death, themes with which he has been obsessed since the early 1990s. His 10 large-format oils and two sculptures (all 2005) took war as their subject, a potent theme considering France's vociferous opposition to the American-led offensive in Iraq.

In the front gallery stood War, a matte-black block of polystyrene crudely hacked to resemble a human skull perched on a base. Impaled with plastic model warplanes and topped with a toy eagle (that worn-out symbol of freedom), this memento mori set the tone for the show.

The ground of each canvas consists of combat aircraft, scanned from photographs, enlarged and reprinted in their pixelated glory on Trevira, a synthetic fiber. Invoking both science and psychoanalysis, Pencreac'h dubs his process "sublimation," the "action of purifying, of transforming by raising to another level." In a realist style reminiscent of Eric Fischl, over his phallic war images he paints human figures, animals and burning landscapes, occasionally punctuated with found objects (toy soldiers, a plastic whale, faux feathers). These panoramas are often framed within architectonic grid patterns.

Atomic displays a naked, blurred couple copulating as a geyser-like fire rages nearby and a French fighter jet, surrounded by birds, drops bombs from the sky. Annunciation presents a domestic interior in which a male figure clutches a bloody butcher knife and sits next to a hanging, disemboweled animal carcass (more Soutine than Rembrandt). As munitions-toting military craft fly overhead and the cityscape succumbs to flames, a monumental eagle greets the murderer in the room, like Gabriel visiting the Virgin. Pencreac'h punctured or slashed both paintings, as he did others in the show. For him, these slits and holes symbolize the female sex. "I transform each painting into a woman," he has irreverently claimed.

With their potpourri of images juxtaposing desire and destruction, Pencreac'h's new paintings offer dreamscapes that beg all kinds of Freudian questions. They also resuscitate Georges Bataille's notion of eroticism--the lustful pursuit of pleasure to the point of death. In so doing, they suggest that the conflict to which the artist alludes in the exhibition's title is a personal struggle with his own compulsions. One thing is certain: Pencreac'h has put aside some of the self-conscious bad-boy provocation that beleaguered his early work in favor of compositional and technical poise, a richer iconography and a lusher, less acrid palette.

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COPYRIGHT 2005 Gale Group