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Jim Torok at Bill Maynes - New York
Art in America, April, 2003 by Anna Hammond
Jim Torok's paintings are shrinking. In his last solo show at Bill Maynes, his perfectly painted portraits of friends were all 3 3/4 by 3 inches. In this exhibition, the works measure 2 1/2 by 2 inches and he only portrays himself. The seven tiny pictures show an impassive face and are varied by a different colored T-shirt or background, and a little bit more or less of the artist's thinning hair. They're not pretty but they are prettily painted. Torok's carefully detailed self-portraits are oil on archival polymer on inch-thick wood panel. A Northern Renaissance style of painting (thin layers of color and glazes) clashes with the deadpan repetitive quality of the images. Viewing the series is like looking through a stack of passport photographs of the same person taken on different days; the effect is not entirely satisfying. But the malaise that Torok invokes in these small pictures turns to humor in his series of quirkily drawn storyboards that comment on the life of the artist.
Two separate spaces in the gallery were devoted to a series of hilarious drawings that address the time that Torok spends contemplating his proverbial navel. In Life of the Artist (Good) and Life of the Artist (Bad), two large pieces of paper are divided into three horizontal bands in which the pros and cons of an artist's life are dissected. The "good" life is illustrated in color. One section of the drawing shows the curvaceous back of a model sitting on a stool under which is written: "You Get To Paint Naked Women (Called `Nudes')." In the "bad" life, drawn in black and white, the same issue is addressed through a picture of several clothed art-gals under which is written, "Nobody Will Pose Nude For You." In another drawing, I Am Lucky, the same three-tier narrative structure is employed with vignettes realized through text and image. Underneath a self-portrait (this time a goony cartoon face with an enormous droopy nose) Torok writes, "I Have a Roof Over My Head," and a tiny, booklike roof draped on top of his head protects him from a sleeting rain. Many viewers in the gallery, including this one, laughed out loud while looking at these storyboards. There was something about the lack of self-consciousness in the overtly self-conscious storytelling, mixed with the humorous ironies in the drawings, that made these works particularly effective.
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