100 Ways of Looking at a Corot (and Other Forms of Leisure)
David Markus
Among the great painters of leisure, Jean Baptiste-Camille Corot stands out as one of the finest. Bathers enjoying the dying light of a late August swim, or figures crouched in a moment of intimate contemplation, distracted by their reveries from the day’s chores–in the languorous pastors of Corot, even the peasants have time to daydream. Coming of age in the late 1840s, and continuing to produce work throughout the second half of that century, Corot is historically situated at the birth of modern painting, and his influence upon the giants of modernism–from Monet to Picasso–is enough to make him a relevant study tool to any contemporary painter; though he is certainly an unlikely figure to place at the altar of one’s veneration. Allison Katz has spent at least as much time with the works of the man whom Degas said "anticipated everything," as she has with those of the painter who bears her famous moniker. Katz’s current show at the Maison de la culture Marie-Uguay in Montreal is dominated by works that mimic and update Corot’s Arcadian vision.
The influence of the 19th Century master is openly acknowledged by the crown jewel of the exhibit: a wall-encompassing grid of tiny portraits entitled 100 Ways of Looking at a Corot. In this clever, engrossing work, Katz gives us 100 individual studies of the 1866 masterpiece, Agostina, varying, with each portrait, the quality of the brushwork and the tones used to convey her revered subject. In one painting the shadow accentuating the subject’s jaw line is a brilliant pink, in another, a muddy greenish hue. It is as if Katz had resolved to do a study-a-day, each time allowing the circumstances surrounding her procedure–her mood, or the colors on her palette, left from previous undertakings–to dictate the composition. In the age of mechanical reproduction, the work is a profound refutation of image-capturing technology, effectively arguing for the incomparable tenuity and slip of human touch.
Although 100 Ways is a work of devotion, Katz’s painting style is everything but reverent. Here, as in most of Katz’s work, opticality gives way to innocence, whimsy, and, at times, an in-your-face laziness that is well suited to the "all-too-human" philosophical assertions of the piece. The backgrounds of the tiny figures have been poorly attended to–allowed to dry in wrinkled and bubbling patterns. The paintings are "rendered" only just so far as they need to be. What pervades them is not so much effortlessness (for Katz is too irreverent a painter to make easy-to-look-at pictures) as a sense that one need not "work" a piece any farther than its subject matter demands. For a two-by-two inch detail of a larger painting, it seems the demands are few.
For several years, Katz has modeled for Montreal painter Susannah Phillips, whose recent show at Lori Bookstein in New York was comprised by several of Katz’s paintings interspersed with Morandi-esque still lifes. Phillips, like Morandi before her, is a master of effortlessness–despite being the former student of the painstaking Euan Uglow–and Katz owes much to her tutelage. Indeed, were Katz’s painting less assured of its own whimsical peculiarities, she might appear to be a sophomoric disciple of the school from which she has emerged–failing to capture, in loose brushstrokes and awkward compositions, the liminal space between frivolity and intent that her mentors so gracefully inhabit. As it turns out, she transcends this washy metaphysical sub-genre entirely, creating works that are far more boundary-pressing in terms of what may be accomplished in paint.
In works like Botanical Joe (a recumbent blue-haired figure against a shimmering slab of pink concrete), Katz resembles a latter day fauvist, her whimsical color choices belied by a figurative presence–a concise humanness–that Derain could only have dreamt of. In At the Window, an otherwise drab sepia-colored painting of a daydreaming boy is made extraordinary by an unexpected blotch of red that accentuates the curvature of the figure’s profile and is echoed with brilliant subtlety where flecks of sunlight catch the topmost tufts of his tousled hair. In a series of Hockney-esque cutouts (to name another great painter of leisure), painted figures interact charmingly with their flat construction paper environs, as Katz playfully abstracts and re-synthesizes several diorama-like exteriors. In one especially blithe image, Cool Recliner, a cruise ship appears upon an ocean horizon, its single-color silhouette an ever-so-slightly lighter shade of blue than the sky surrounding it.
Here is an artist whose enterprise is one of joyous observation. Her humorous, fanciful works neither judge, nor demean their aloof subjects. Rather, they playfully explore the unlikely kinship between tenderness and absurdity found within the lighthearted sanctuaries of the leisure class. Nowhere is this more apparent than in Garden Party, in which a series of sports-jacket and summer dress clad yuppies dance their way through a washy, unrealized ground of turp-splashed green and amber. The scene expresses nostalgia for an innocent time whose impossibility the artist seems acutely aware of. Think a less creepy version of David Lynch’s suburban landscapes.
At times, Katz’s color selections caress the limits of good taste. Take, for instance, the tube-and-turp laziness of the evergreens adorning Notes on Camp. But even here, the more cloying aspects of her pictorial choices are redeemed by the ironic tone of the painting’s title and the peculiarity of its narrative: another reposing figure utterly indifferent to the fact that her sketches have blown amongst the shrubbery. If this is a self portrait, it is perfectly complimented by the one adorning the show’s postcard. There, we see a headstrong voluptuary with radiant, wind-blown hair, haloed by the light of an unseen morning sun, and set within a conflux of snaking tendrils and earth-tones. Like many great painters before her, Katz exploits the contradictory leanings of her artistic prowess, gravitating between languid repose and fiery arousal, chromatic muddiness and day-glow concision, between a style that nearly succumbs beneath its own nonchalance, and a forceful originality that somehow, brilliantly, works.
