Billy Sullivan at Fischbach - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions

Art in America, Feb, 1995 by Richard Kalina

Billy Sullivan's landscapes and portraits shown this fall at Fischbach have a built-in nostalgia. They are, for the most part, scenes of the beach, the pool or the garden, set at the height of summer. They combine the immediacy and offhandedness of a snapshot with the exactness of mood and detail found in a poem by Frank O'Hara. I'm also reminded of David Hockney's odes to Southern California warmth and leisure, and yet the pleasure-landscapes Hockney portrays possess a timelessness, an almost Fragonardian impermeability that Sullivan's paintings do not. There is a fragility to these paintings, a stiffness, that seems to suggest that it's all temporary--the weather will turn cold, everybody will go back to the grit and hassle of New York, and the summer will be all the sweeter for having passed into memory.

Sullivan's paintings are marvelously evocative, almost olfactory in effect. You smell the flowers, the chlorine, the ocean, the sweat, the suntan oil. This is particularly true of P.F.W.'s Hollyhocks I and II Both paintings are of a lush garden of tall red hollyhocks. Except for a swath of sky, warm vegetation is everywhere. Everything is pushed right at us, all foreground, the better to savor. Flowers and leaves mingle in a welter of deft, assertive marks that suggest not only Monet, but also his late 20th-century neighbor on the outskirts of Paris, Joan Mitchell.

Alert to place and mood, Sullivan is also a portraitist finely tuned to the complexities of characters. His self-portrait shows a man in a bathing suit, somewhere between sturdy and stocky, standing on the beach. Almost life-sized, the figure, which fills the frame vertically, is facing the viewer. Since Manet we have come to expect a portrait like this to confront us head-on, but in Sullivan's painting the directness is undercut by the figure's downward look and by the equivocal gesture of his hand either scratching or holding his head. The water seems to echo this ambivalence, meeting the beach at a diagonal while the horizon line remains parallel to the edge of the frame. The angle of the raised arm mirrors the angle of the beach and thus allows for a more dynamic off-center placement of the figure.

In Clarissa, Dave, and Flora a woman and two black dogs stand on the beach before a band of citrus-green dune grass. All we see of the woman, however, is two legs, a hand and a patch of bathing suit; it is the dogs who carry the show. The small puglike one at the woman's feet is caught in mid-scamper, looking up at the big, impassive poodle with what appears to be hopeless adoration mixed with irritability. As witty and causal-seeming as this painting is, it rests, as does most of Sullivan's work, on a complex classical composition--in this case one of triangles and verticals put together with an eye for sharp tonal contrasts.

Sullivan has been painting for a long time now, but there's nothing self-satisfied about his work. It is confident and lively, full of verve but ready to go for the sour note if veracity requires it. Pleasure, Sullivan seems to say, survives because of, not despite, its replaceability.