Kim Leutwyler | Shane
The gesture is one of wanting to better understand and deconstruct the effect of this newly arriving imagery, this particular painting: a clearly figured, mannequin-like pose, green abstraction in daring sloshes, so that we have paint handling of two different sorts: the more photorealistic male figure, contrasted with, the green splashes. The green makes them also resemble foliage. The expression of the figure is neutral, with striking blue eyes. The daring hints of turquoise blue-green make the figuration pop. The light purple azure sits just right as a backdrop. The figure is looking off askance. The green-yellow-brown abstractions are very cleverly posed as potentialities of foliage, a drapery of plants. The painting is influenced by postmodernism insofar as it blends or assembles two different techniques (the way the male figure is rendered versus how the “foliage” is rendered) within one style, affirming a hybrid multiplicity in unity. The painting has a certain freedom to it; while the image is beautiful, it is not eroticized; nothing about it pressures the gaze with anything besides beauty.
Accordingly, one might say that this painting is suspended between apparition and emergence. The figure is rendered with careful smoothness; “Shane” appears iconographic, an idealized visitation surfacing through paint. Around him, though, the painting refuses stillness. The slashes and drips of green-gold abstraction descend like hanging vines, oxidation, liquid foliage, or the memory of foliage. They interrupt the photorealistic figuration without destroying it, creating a tension between the controlled image and the unruly event of paint-as-paint. In this sense, the artist allows the medium to retain its autonomy. The painting never collapses into illustration. The body is there, but so is the process of becoming visible.
The foliage-like abstractions simultaneously obscure and frame the figure, as though the body were appearing through leaves, memory, camouflage, or painterly weather. The turquoise and lavender fields generate an atmosphere that is neither interior nor exterior, neither naturalistic nor wholly abstract. The figure’s blue eyes become startling partly because the surrounding palette creates a chromatic ecology around them; the cool blues pulse against the warmer flesh tones and olive-gold drips.
The result is contemplative beauty. The pose recalls glamour portraiture or fashion photography, yet the emotional tenor avoids seduction. Instead, the figure seems distant, inward, quietly self-contained, looking beyond the frame toward something withheld from the viewer.
Notes on Moments of Gesture by John Hughes.
