Louisiana blend: in the course of a 30-year career, Douglas Bourgeois has knowingly reconciled the hallmarks of regionalism with the formal concerns of modernism. A traveling retrospective now showcases his trenchant and witty art

Art in America, Feb, 2004 by Isabelle Loring Wallace

As Louisiana's leading fantasy based realist painter, Douglas Bourgeois deserves both a broader audience and more probing analysis. In the wake of his first retrospective, "Baby-Boom Daydreams," he is likely to get both. With their uncanny dramas and enamel-like clarity, Bourgeois's paintings are typically grouped with the work of other so-called Visionary Imagists from Louisiana (George Febres, Jacqueline Bishop, Dona Lief). (1) One particular joy of the current exhibition is its demonstration of the ways in which Bourgeois both reflects and transcends this regional kinship.

Bourgeois, who graduated from Louisiana State University with a degree in painting in 1974, purposefully adopts certain hallmarks of an unsophisticated, self-taught esthetic--frontality, inconsistent scale, awkward perspective, the absence of facture, brilliant color--often deploying them in conjunction with references and motifs (voodoo, oil refineries, local musicians) that mark him as the product of a specific place. Yet his choice of subject matter and theme just as often exceeds and undermines the regionalism to which he seems to subscribe. The show exposes Bourgeois's affinities with a much larger, more diverse constellation of artists (its brightest stars being Frida Kahlo and Joseph Cornell).

Organized by David Rubin, curator of visual arts at the Contemporary Arts Center in New Orleans, the exhibition features 65 works produced between 1975 and 2001, an impressive number given that the artist's painstaking attention to detail severely limits his output. The majority of the works in the exhibition are small-scale oils on either linen or panel, and there is a sampling of Bourgeois's three-dimensional work.

As with other fantasy-based realists who came of age in New Orleans in the early 1980s, Bourgeois's work is indebted to religious icons and comic books in equal measure, and though his airless, graphic esthetic does betray some shifts and developments over time, such changes are ultimately outstripped by the force of a single vision, the first traces of which appeared in the mid-'70s. Dividing his initial efforts between explicitly religious works (Annunciations, portrayals of saints and martyrs) and erotically charged representations of celebrities (movie stars, poets and musicians of varying renown), Bourgeois makes no stylistic distinction between the two, perhaps because as a boy he was himself both an aspiring priest and an avid consumer of pop culture.

This continuity can be appreciated when one compares a work like Setchie as St. Francis (1983) with the contemporaneous portrait of Vanity 6 singer Susan Moonsie (1984). The overt and highly stylized sexuality of the African-American performer, who wears a purple gown and long gloves, is augmented by flaming, heart-shaped portraits of Prince, her onetime lover, that are as much emblems of their "fiery" love affair as they are the sacred heart of Catholic iconography--a motif which Bourgeois surrounds with thorns and repeats in the wallpaper pattern, alternating with bands of suggestively profane calla lilies. Similarly, Bourgeois's image of St. Francis conveys the saint's swooning spirituality with all the appropriate trappings--halo, monastic robe, stigmata and the animals to which he preached. Yet the title underscores the masquerade, while the tousled hair and bare nipple (not to mention the exaggeratedly phallic rendering of the neck and head) infuse this icon with the signs of Bourgeois's interest in the latent erotics of a celibate monk.

With near-caricatural faces and a supersaturated psychedelic palette, works like these are camp in both form and content. Their dual preoccupation with--even conflation of--Catholicism and fame also recall Andy Warhol. Twilight High Yearbook (1978), a painting of a high-school yearbook page with headshots in grid formation, suggests that Bourgeois was aware of this connection early on, even if his slow and very unmechanical process bears no resemblance to that of his famous predecessor. A subject he returns to later ilk his career, the yearbook page makes for an uncharacteristically straightforward engagement of esthetic concerns clear to postwar art: flatness, repetition and the relation of painting to photography. But in compromising the original seriousness of the grid with the cheeky names--Desire J. Guillory, Chastity Rouge, Sylvan Sheets and Bambi Stiletto--and racially diverse faces of fictional students, Bourgeois makes plain the oblique nature of his relation to modernist orthodoxy.

In the late 1980s, Bourgeois made a series of assemblages in homage to Joseph Cornell. Comprising both two- and three-dimensional elements, these works are the artist's only foray into sculpture, though even here, the wall-mounted presentation ensures that they are perceived in terms of painting. Fewer than 10 in number, these pieces are among the weakest in Bourgeois's oeuvre, perhaps because their shallow, tripartite compositions conjure the stage, altarpiece and icon simultaneously and directly, making unambiguous the suggestive analogies that were only implicit in the paintings that preceded them.