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Elizabeth Peyton at Gavin Brown's enterprise - New York - Brief Article
Art in America, March, 2002 by Sarah Valdez
Elizabeth Peyton's latest portraits depict thin, modern, beautifully anguished young people--commonplace urban hipsters, for the most part--and fewer famous characters than her audience is used to seeing. Sometimes she works from photographs, other times from her imagination. As usual, she applies oil paint so airily that the canvas can sometimes be seen beneath. While watery in texture, Peyton's colors are mostly deep and rich: bright red, chartreuse and purple elegantly contrast with beiges and blacks. Patches of white gesso peek through, giving a sense that the artist is so admiring of her own paintings that she's afraid to touch them.
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Ben Drawing shows a waifish, pale boy with scruffy black hair and tattoos lounging in black bathing briefs on a brightly colored beach towel. He's making pink squiggles on a piece of paper. A body of water extends behind him. The same dark-haired boy is the subject of Peyton's September. Here, he sits by the sea at sunset, striking a concave, effete posture. The orange glow of the horizon rivals his impossibly crimson lips.
Though Peyton sometimes paints women, she mostly paints men. Nude (Tony) shows a man with sinewy curves coquettishly lying on his belly, sinking handsomely into fluffy white sheets. Spencer at Florent has only one button on his shirt done up: chest and navel are visible. Peyton's esthetic isn't low; it's rarefied, decadent and a tad edgy. Hers is a universe of pampered, good-looking delicate people who appear perpetually malcontent in the face of privilege. Even a calico cat gets the artist's "it" treatment. The beast, with a collar reading "Blossom," languishes luxuriously on a bed. Her spots are exquisite, her eyes are sleepy and she teasingly lets one of her paw's delicate, petal-pink pads show, just so.
A portrait titled Prince William at the Queen Mother's Birthday lurks among all the images of Peyton's comparatively unfamous muses. If one wants to read this show as a freestanding body of work, William's inclusion is either an ironic acknowledgment of the vapidity and pretense underlying Peyton's careful accumulation of pretty personages, or it's an unabashedly serious attempt to include the young royal among her rosy-lipped, aqua-eyed cadre. In either case, the portrait made me laugh out loud.
Peyton expresses her own artistic identity by collecting people through her paintings. In addition to her friends, previous work has found her obsessing over Prince Harry, various artworld figures, Jean-Pierre Leaud, Kurt Cobain, Sid Vicious, Marlon Brando and Ludwig II of Bavaria, among others. It's at once silly and extremely clever for her to make work that hangs around like so many posters of celebrities on a pining teenager's bedroom wall. Peyton's images are strikingly like advertisements, those powerful, insidious things that define so much of contemporary culture, identities and desires. Here, it's the artist herself who's brazenly for sale--to her audience, and maybe even to herself. In fact, she's so achingly vacant that, even without knowing who she is, one misses her to death.
COPYRIGHT 2002 Brant Publications, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2002 Gale Group
