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John Currin is the Caligula of painting.
Our tastes often betray us as we find ourselves drawn to questionable things we know are problematic.
That is where I am with Currin.
Everyone writes about his great skill.
But that is ridiculous.
Currin has no more or less skill than any good artist.
Personally, I glaze over at all the smooth ye-olden labor-intensive historical rendering that goes into his work.
Bram Dijkstra called paintings like these visions of women as semi-comatose wanton succubi Idols of Perversity.
No one gets off on Currins pictures of women with lute-shaped faces.
All male commodifications of female sexuality and subjectivity.
This 59-year-old mid-career artist has raised hackles since his 1992 debut.
Meanwhile, the New YorkTimeswondered if these paintings of women should even be regarded as acceptable at all.
The way we often feel, standing outside ourselves, looking in, while having genuine experiences.
The irony comes in wondering how he can be serious about bizarre pictures like this?
By now, many see him as just a super successful art-world pariah making paintings for rich collectors.
Its not so simple.
The gallery was often full and always silent.
Is it okay to like this?
Dont you hate it?
Keep in mind that these are not, per se, paintings of women.
They are paintings of sculptures of women or forms cast in ash.
Nothing else can exist in these traps.
We are as far from the warmth of any human sun as I recall in contemporary painting.
In some ways, Currins depiction is not that different from all these things we accept and revere.
In one of the best three paintings here,Sunflower, a woman sits on a shrouded seat.
She is a psychically devastated corpse.
These figures cannot move.
Her waist is emaciated, belly distended, her mind a silent howl of stasis.
As with many of Currins females, her breasts are gargantuan, just rounded mastitis masses.
In addition toCaryatid,an almost Pontormo-meets-van-painting ballerina-Madonna-angel imprisoned in the painting, the other real masterpiece here isMantis.
She or they might as well be hippos with pincer limbs and useless arms.
All the figures expose indented vulvas with no labial interface; breasts have no nipples.
Currin has gone all in on his despised vision.
That is the enormous Achilles heel to this art that can make it impossible for his foes to accept.
They leave you an easy way out.
That is the big difference.
Currins surfaces are satiny, smooth, and not physically alive or original.
It would be like trying to revive Viennese waltzes: a form of zombiism.
Imagine this Currin show but with Native American, Black, Asian, or Hispanic women.
But Currins distorted female nudes are as old as art.
All of these are variations of the male gaze.
When I look at these pictures I see all that.
But also, something else.
An instant after this, the disenchanted embittered cycle of this kind of seeing ignites again.
I know that being absorbed with this work might be damning.
