Untitled (bo1104), 201, enamel on chipboard, 15 x 11.5""

It is tempting to call Tucker Nichols’ work the product of an artful dodger, but there is nothing about his exhibition of drawings, paintings, collages and sculpture that dodges anything, even though a few of the 50 untitled works seem intended to look “dodgy” insofar as their material construction is concerned.  It is much better to say that his method (or better yet, his process) is squarely post-Kippenbergian, even though such a description sounds a bit crazy. For better or worse, the late Martin Kippenberger is the artist who has gained indisputable recognition for making a wide variety of seemingly unrelated kinds of work in an equally unrelated variety of styles, and that project seems to have put contemporary painting on its heels by calling the supposed need for a signature style into question. Now painters are as free as conceptual artists to execute works as parts of self-defined “projects,” and Nichols’ elaborate series of painterly projects sit squarely in this seemingly new mode of painterly operation.  His particular version of this kind of practice revolves around the making of forms that are simultaneously elegant, awkwardly humorous and deceptively simple. I’ll go even further and say that his work epitomizes the deceptively simple by slyly reinventing the very poetics of visual understatement in a moment when shrill and abundant plenitude characterize the burgeoning field of the visual arts.

At first pass, many of Nichols’ works appear to be unfinished attempts at making innocent renderings of everyday objects.  Look closer and you will see something else at play.  It is almost as if Nichols adopts one personality to start a given piece of work and then purposefully abandons both the personality and the work created by it so that a very different alter ego can come to the fore. That second personality is able to encounter the seemingly unfinished image as a found object, to which slight additions and or adjustments can be made to highlight a kind of absurd improbability.  Oftentimes, these adjustments take the forms of hand written words that seem related to everyday signage, as in a stretched banner that takes its title from Helevetica typography that spells out Standards of Excellence/ Kitchens of Style, or a smaller work on panel sporting the simply drawn phrase Roughly the Size of New Jersey. 

Untitled (mp1109), 2011, pencil on paper, 40 x 33.5”; Untitled (bo1113), 2011, flashe and pencil on paper, 18.5” x 14”

Other works are enlivened by the deft albeit understated use of spay paint in either metallic of florescent variation, sometimes applied to the sides rather than the faces of the panels that they use as supports.  And did I mention that most of the works are quite small?  Indeed, the vast majority of the works included in this exhibition are intimately scaled works on paper encased in modest frames that often times seem to have been recovered from thrift shops.  Others seem more stylish, but either way, they contribute to the works’ subtlety, which is to say that Nichols always manages to find a slightly off-center way of placing one of his slightly off-center drawings into a frame to create the tenuous and improbable balance that exerts so much subtle charm.  

Untitled (bu1109), 2011, spray paint and house paint on panel, 8 x 10 x 1.75”

One of Nichols’ favorite forms is a kind of gridded mesh that looks a bit like an empty fishnet that could have been drawn by Philip Guston.  These are usually executed as a set of intersecting black lines of ink, paint or charcoal, but they also seem quite casual, rather like half-conscious doodles that the artist discovers to be elegant calligraphy by a kind of happy accident. A good example is Untitled mp1109, executed on a fairly large sheet of clean white paper as if it were a schematic map of a cluster of suburban streets.  But look again and you will also see a study of proportional relationships worthy of Mondrian.  This visual double entendre is particularly evident in Untitled (mp1110) in which the artist uses spray paint and fluorescent color on a plywood panel to create a charming tension between common materials and sophisticated formal arrangements.

It is worth noting that several of the works in this exhibition are sculpture, usually made of stacks of improbable objects, such as a stone set atop a roll of florescent masking tape upon a small table.

These add an additional dimension to the overall exhibition, but I can’t help but see them as being a bit too close the work of David Ireland, another artist who specialized in making uncanny arrangements of simple objects.  And there is one large piece, which is a kind of mural made from digital enlargements of a small ink and watercolor work. It bespeaks a whole other way of working for Nichols, and although it asks him to sacrifice his elegant touch with water-based media on paper, it gives him a way of insinuating his work into public viewing spaces that might otherwise be indifferent to seductive visual intimacy.

–MARK VAN PROYEN

Tucker Nichols: “New Work” @ Gallery 16 through June 30, 2011.

About the Author
Mark Van Proyen is Chair of the Painting Department of the San Francisco Art Institute. He is a corresponding editor for Art in America, and his critical writings have appeared in many publications, including Art Criticism, Artweek and Art Issues.  He is currently working on a novel titled Theda’s Island, the story of which is set in the art world.

“Braced”, 2011, mixed media on paper, 60 x 44′‘

Few artists have blurred the line between photography and painting as thoroughly and convincingly as Deborah Oropallo. Her pixel-by-pixel method of reworking Internet images is, by its very nature, perfectly suited to an era in which personal identity can be reinvented on-the-fly with a few mouse clicks. But unlike the ideologically freighted identity art of the ‘80s and ‘90s, Oropallo’s is refreshingly open-ended. It doesn’t proselytize; it just poses and fantasizes.  Its high-camp, wide-open, anything-goes stance, will, I predict, position Oropallo as the art world’s answer to the virtual one we’ve created. That Internet downloads enabled her futuristic, gender-confused universe makes the irony of its creation as delicious as the artist’s irrepressible bad-girl attitude. That her art breaks through our acquired resistance to media imagery is, I think, a tribute to the 20 years the artist spent as a painter before moving into the digital realm in 2000. 

Guise, her 2007 show at the de Young Museum, was a major breakthrough. Onto 17^th century portraits of aristocrats, emperors, kings and other authority figures, Oropallo superimposed female faces. She replaced pants with skirts, stockings with garters and boots with high-heels. The result was an androgynous look in which power poses and gestures typically struck by men were inhabited by she-men.  Wrapped in a kind of gauzy, anamorphic, now-you-see-it-now-you don’t haze, the pictures baffled unassuming visitors, fooling them into thinking they were viewing tired old museum fare, when in fact the notion of the inviolable historic portrait was being surreptitiously and slyly subverted. The pictures were convincingly male and female; they conveyed what a third gender might actually look like. They revised the history of power relations between the sexes, creating as Oropallo has stated, “a new royalty” out of nurses, maids and others low on history’s social totem pole. 

“Armed”, 2011, mixed media on paper, 28 x 22”

Two years later, at the Stephen Wirtz Gallery (and at Gallery 16 which created prints from the series), she unveiled the Wild, Wild West Show: kitschy fantasy pictures based on downloaded images of rodeo queens clad in skimpy outfits. Like the figures in Guise, these felt like apparitions, too. The source images, which underwent extreme digital surgery, appeared to have been selectively erased, and with only portions of the bodies and pieces of clothing intact, all that remained were ghosts executing hyperkinectic gestures. Measuring nearly seven feet tall and mounted on aluminum panels, the prints were at once intimate and distant, erotic and horrifying. They were also radical and thrilling.  Oropallo had pushed her skills as a digital painter to a new level – one that probably didn’t win over any old-school critics who wished she’d return to the brush.  But she definitely re-affirmed and enlarged her status as a game-changing artist.

Tale Spin, Oropallo’s current exhibit at Gallery 16, builds on those innovations. For openers each print is unique.  The source images, culled from costume websites, are printed on paper-backed lengths of silk and chiffon and affixed to sheets of paper. The resulting pictures are messy, highly tactile composites of bold, see-through action gestures. Their distressed surfaces, with their dangling threads, have a battered, bandaged look – one whose multiple layers will likely require an almost anthropological effort on the part of viewers to fully soak in the details.  Where Cindy Sherman is the historical antecedent for Guise, de Kooning, with his slashing gestures and fierce, comic, demonic women provide the template for Tale Spin.  Oropallo’s, like de Kooning’s, are composed of parts that seem to live independent lives and create crazy shifts in pictorial anatomy.  But they are clearly her own.  They reflect the artist’s complex relationship to the stuff of her childhood: uniforms, costumes and fairytales.  The latter, she recently told a Gallery 16 audience, are always “about death and dismemberment and rape; a little girl is always the victim.  I wanted these girls to be grown up in kind of a post-feminist way,” one “that would put the wolf on the run.” 

“Subdued”, 2011, mixed media on paper, 60 x 44”

To effect such a “spin” the artist asked, “What would Bo Peep be afraid of today?”  From web queries like “designer gas mask” she found answers in products like the Emergency Bra, whose cups convert into a dual respirator gas mask, perfect for protection against terrorist attacks like 9/11 which spewed toxic dust across Manhattan. “That would be what you would have to be afraid of if you were a shepherd today,” Oropallo stated.

The figures in Tale Spin mix terror and humor in roughly equal parts. Gas-mask outfitted models are funny. Faceless mini-skirted babes, not so much. In between those poles, Oropallo offers a host of female superheroes striking poses we’ve seen in comic characters from Wonder Woman and Spider Man to Bat Man and Captain America. Like Guise, which postulated a world of infinitely fluid sexuality, Tale Spin operates outside the axis of good vs. evil. The figures project power, but their titles (Entangled, Dubious, Cured, Cursed, Powerlessness, Lost, Hushed, and Muffled ) take it away. Make what you will of that. 

"Phaeodarubus", mixed media collage on linen, 76” x 76”

Had you parachuted into San Francisco in 1970 and not known better, you might have thought the city had been overrun by mystics. Brass Buddhas and Hindu scrolls decorated bedrooms and dorm rooms. Alan Watts spoke to morning commuters live on KPFA. Concert posters, plastered across town, mixed Asian religious imagery with psychedelic visions; and the record album covers whose vinyl contents transformed the entire culture swept in a new kind of commercial surrealism that borrowed as freely from pop culture as they did from the occult.   

"Nelastrus" mixed media collage on linen, 68” x 120”

"Ascomycular" , mixed media collage on linen, 76” x 76”

Learn more aboiut Rex Ray.