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14/2/2008

Robin Williams

Jack the Pelican, New York

Robin Williams paints red-blooded American children being adorably cute, and doubting it. At first glance, her paintings look like updated Norman Rockwells. The neighborhood is safe. The kids are positively precious, their shenanigans as sweet and harmless as baby corn. So too with the manner of her brush. Her confident simplifications of form, line and color--juicy, to say the least--offer an idealized dream of ordinary suburbia. She hits her notes with impressive, smoothly becalmed facility. The surface is measured, controlled, altogether untroubled...

But look! At odds with the lollipop tenderness of the depictions are the kids themselves. They are terrified. Williams convincingly and subtly renders their introspection as a complexity of indigestible magnitude. It hovers in a liminal, unstable space between anger, desire and not knowing--with a think-again grandeur that haunts the paintings. These kids are a second point of entry into the work--as intuitive and loaded as the rest of it is resolved and finished. And this is the very thing that distinguishes Williams from earlier figurative masters, such as Fischl, Yuskavage and Currin, who subsume their subjects in the politics and aesthetics of (satirical) style and pointedly (and perhaps arrogantly) refuse them the fiction and problem of selfhood.

The humanity that Williams sneaks in between the cracks is quite possibly dangerous. Like little Frankenstein monsters, her wunderkind do their bit, without any understanding of why they are here. What is clear is that they are not themselves enchanted by their own cuteness. And that they cannot conceive of any action that is not immediately absorbed into the homogenized texture of it all, as though their every gesture were stuck in the good entertaining spirit of play and remained always on display, like it was all just a movie.

Rembrandt once and for all collides with Rockwell. Return of the repressed. All very good. Language against language. But Williams, who will be celebrating her 24th birthday the night of the opening, speaks plainly in the voice of a new generation, who are not impressed by the superior privilege of ironic distance. No one seems to ever grow up any more. To her, this is of grave concern.

Robin Williams received her BFA in 2006 from the Rhode Island School of Design. This is her first solo show. At the opening, we will be celebrating her 24th birthday.

Opening: Friday, February 15, 7–9pm

Jack the Pelican
487 Driggs Ave. between N. 9 and N. 10 - New York
Hours: Thurs-Mon, 12-6pm

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