I spent my Friday in the West Loop Galleries and was surprised at how manageable the crowds were. Having attended openings where you are literally shoulder to shoulder, hot, grumpy, beerless, and dangerously close to the work, this was a piece of cake.
And speaking of cake: Oh Caleb Weintraub… the things you do to me. If I could gage paintings on perceived levels of deliciousness Caleb Weintraub’s show at the Peter Miller Gallery would be a red velvet cake with cream cheese frosting and sugared pecans on top. I sure do like him a whole lot.
I saw his last show at Peter Miller and was thoroughly enchanted by his ooey gooey painterly style and his spookily violent, wildly militant children in their candy coated Ryden-esque fantasy landscapes. And this year it got better. Weintraub’s gone paint crazy and the alluring viscosity of his work has increased exponentially with his experimentations in using dried pools of paint to cover the surfaces of his mixed media sculptures. The sculptures retain all of the charm and fright of their 2 dimensional counterparts. The children still have angelic faces, the adult figures still have an imposing on-the-cusp-of-death presence, and there is still just enough of the real mixed with the impossible to be convincingly unnerving.
There is something attractively repulsive about the lifelike eyeballs and teeth he’s set into the faces of his mixed media sculptures. There is something so good about the heft of Napoleonic man-boobs and a swinging gut, and that goodness is only magnified by the fact that the figures are covered with vibrant swirling pools of dried paint.
These pools of paint have made previous appearances in his work being carted around, shot, stabbed, hung, buried, mourned, blown apart, gathered like flowers and now worn as skins by his child protagonists.
There were things I didn’t like as much. His paintings in the front room seemed to have lost some of the polish and luster that other canvases (like In the Thick of it 2008) still retain. His work usually seems to have a satisfying balance of brushy dishevelment and just enough pulled together slicked-out beauty to make them magnetic and captivating. I felt like some of the paintings in this show lacked that balance and felt unfinished.
Overall I think his work is super-beautiful, it makes me happy, and I feel like he’s discovered a way to explore the vibrancy and paint-ness of paint on a level that is playful, disturbing, and 100% wonderful.
Oh yeah, I and I checked out Kehinde Wiley. It was okay. I kept thinking, "Gee I wish I was looking at his older work." The best part about his Rhona Hoffman show was standing outside smoking a cigarette (gazing lovingly through the windows of Peter Miller) when he showed up in some sort of big black sports utility vehicle.
ReplyDeleteHe bounded out of the passenger side door leaving it flung open, his half empty cocktail exposed, and said some hellos to acquaintances while googley eyed onlookers waited nearby with their hearts palpitating and their palms clasped to their chests to say something undoubtedly forgettable to him if he ever looked their way.
He wore a red suit with a black swirling wallpaper pattern reminiscent of his portrait backgrounds that I half expected to leap from the lapels and enter the gallery ahead of him. It was awesome in an "are you kidding me?" sort of way.