Michael Workman

The exhibition of John Currin's paintings at the Museum of Contemporary Art is a must-see, and it's closing next Saturday.

Comprised of some forty paintings spanning a period from 1991 to the present, the survey marks Currin's first solo museum show in the US. Of the plentiful reasons why this exhibition shouldn't be missed, the most notable would be to see Currin's visually stunning collection of female figures. If that's not sufficient, however, Currin infuses his figures with a puzzling diversity of image-scavaging art-historical appropriations. In Currin's work, concourse with beautiful bodies, as the old saw goes, begets beautiful discourses. Aesthetically, Currin's work walks the high wire suspended between patterns of physical allure and fears of emotional and artistic self-destruction. In his choice of the female figure as his preferential subject, Currin has comprehensively examined and accentuated select elements of his representation such that, in the final, psychologically complicated images, he clearly attempts to reclaim for the genre of the nude a classical context. But not exactly.

Elusive because of the work's ostensible simplemindedness, Currin's images articulate a carefully codified system of desire at times wooden, gothic, transcendent and even ludicrous. Often rendering his figures so strangely as to suggest soft-core fantasies elevated to the level of the ecstatic, Currin's portraits range from subtle distortion to vulgarian absurdity in his caricatured elements. His female figures have watermelon-sized breasts, garishly elongated limbs that taper and narrow (a hallmark trait of medieval icon painting) and round, hyperbolically fecund sexual-anatomical features. In "Park City Grill," for instance, a young lady is pictured bursting out in laughter, wine glass in hand, with arms, legs and neck elongated as though the emotion itself were responsible for distorting the gesture depicted. Similarly, in "The Pink Tree," a virginal pair capers in the nude against a setting of two trees with their branches cropped to stumps. Currin's ingénues work as a supernatural force in an environment where the personification of sexual emotion is truncated by contemporary, demystified representations of the nude. Indeed, the figures themselves seem amazed at the possibility of their own existence. Openly on display, they appreciatively fondle and graze each other's bodies with thin, delicate fingers in delirious bemusement at their uncanny, fleshy pink shapes.

Most inscrutable in this context is the referential smorgasbord that Currin employs. Are his art-historical insinuations meant to advocate for the pleasure of an indulgent beauty? And if so, where does the need for such prickly distortions lead us as viewers? In the female figure as an object of beauty, Currin's images reveal the potential for a more insidious kind of pleasure. Elements of a Surrealist erotic appear in Currin's portraits, for instance, as well as allusions to the anemic aesthetic of medieval death figures. Of relevance to "The Pink Tree" is also the commonplace personification of Death as a tree-cutter. The effect in Currin's portraits of approximating these familiar elements is something akin to the semblance of life in victims of carbon-monoxide poisoning, where the body, though inert, maintains the apple-cheeked semblance of a living being.

Through this collage of stylistic techniques, Currin discreetly juxtaposes Eros with elements of a distant but distinctly present Thanatos. As noted in other writing on Currin's work, such drastic elements may be necessary to recover the female figure from the pedestrian depiction it has been consigned to at least since Manet's "Olympia." Since unveiling the Impressionist's image of a courtesan at the Salon of Paris in 1865, rather than a Venus or Diana, the female figure has become more of what it had been all along: a real woman's nude body. In Currin, this process of interpretation through personification extends beyond the female figure as well. His 2002 painting, "Fishermen," for instance, depicts a pair of male nudes crammed into a small boat on choppy waters. In their struggle to feed, these two vital figures compete for survival against the natural limits of their human forms, the waters, and even the birds in the sky.

Ultimately, by demonstrating a preferred strategy of singling out the female nude as the imaginative personification of the human cycle of life and death, Currin signals that he reveres and is working to reinvest the female figure with elements of fable, fairy tale and mythology. Currin's brand of Eros-Thanatos dichotomy, as cannily depicted in these figures, is done through a kind of motive force, a raising of human emotion to the level of the cosmological. This strategy takes on a dramatic significance in Currin's portrait of his wife in "Rachel and Butterflies," where the subject of his portrait is an actual human being--and, accorded the avowals of marriage, his last and best friend.

So, if you've been holding out, go see this show before it closes. As an exhibition of one artist's winking attempt to place an old genre into an obsolete context, the devotion and daring of Currin's attempt alone makes it worth the price of admission.

"John Currin" shows at the Museum of Contemporary Art, 220 East Chicago, through August 24.

(2003-08-13)

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