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Karen Kilimnik’s works flirt with different historical styles through loosely daubed paint and suggestive props—yet the rococo-tinged notion of charm found a fresh incarnation in her recent exhibition at the 303 Gallery in Chelsea. The Bluebird in the Folly, one of two installations that punctuated the gathering of intimately scaled paintings and drawings, is a witty concoction that plays upon the type of garden pavilions that dot the grounds of the Petit Trianon at Versailles, former domain of Madame de Pompadour and Marie Antoinette.
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Charmed – Allison Unruh
Karen Kilimnik’s works flirt with different historical styles through loosely daubed paint and suggestive props—yet the rococo-tinged notion of charm found a fresh incarnation in her recent exhibition at the 303 Gallery in Chelsea. The Bluebird in the Folly, one of two installations that punctuated the gathering of intimately scaled paintings and drawings, is a witty concoction that plays upon the type of garden pavilions that dot the grounds of the Petit Trianon at Versailles, former domain of Madame de Pompadour and Marie Antoinette. Such pavilions offered sites for pursuing pleasures within bucolic landscape settings, epitomizing the aristocratic escapism that could be played out within the confines of palace grounds. Rather than opening onto a picturesque vista of surrounding gardens, we are given flowery chintz drapery and a stagy video of fairy-like ballerinas alighting in a charmed forest. The camera pans through an improvised, wooded glen as chirping birds and classical music conjure up miniature ballerinas who pirouette on branches and leaves, their attenuated bodies performing the notion of charm in such an insistent way that it almost seems abstract. The edges of the forest at times open up onto bare white walls, and the camera momentarily slips to reveal a sliver of the studio, emphasizing the constructed nature of the fairyland fantasy.
The pavilion’s interior includes two collages that evoke the stages of the 18th century, where nobles would indulge their fantasies, even act out the roles onstage themselves—as explicitly alluded to in the diminutive Marie Antoinette’s Little Theater, loosely sketched in colorful crayon on paper that lends a sense of naïveté, as if the drawing is the product of a girlish reverie of escape. Kilimnik’s pavilion might seem like an overgrown dollhouse to visitors at the gallery, proffering a gesture of play within the sanctum of the gallery; it succeeds in part due to the way it seamlessly fuses the notion of 18th century architecture of escape with the girlish notion of the dollhouse as a space of fantasy.
The exhibition’s other installation is equally a space of fantasy, yet this time it is also a daydream of Napoleonic conquest. The Debonair General’s Tent effectively evokes the mood of an early 19th century campaign tent (complete with a map-strewn desk on which rests a helmet and spyglass), while nevertheless offering a pastiche of it—a historical aura and a sense of playfulness are held in a delicate balance. The striped fabric of the tent is historically evocative but clearly modern, while music plays within that dramatically amplifies the already-romanticized assemblage. Toy soldiers spread haphazardly over the maps inject the tableau with a sense of childhood fantasies, where imaginary battles are simply a matter of back-and-forth play.
Several paintings of equestrian subjects compliment the themes developed in The Debonair General’s Tent, clear relations of Gericault’s romantic and psychically fraught steeds of the early 19th century. Like Kilimnik’s other paintings in the show, the horses are painted on diminutive canvases, about 8 x 10 inches, drawing the viewer into a more intimate spectatorial relationship, and are painted in her characteristically loose strokes of oil paint that at times appear unfinished. This lightness of touch, where the paint seems to still be fresh on the canvas, lends to the works the feeling that they are at a perpetually nascent stage of creation, with all of its latent potential for metamorphosis. Kilimnik’s works are at their best when presented as an assemblage, so that the viewer’s experience is akin to meandering through a dream wherein the accumulation of fragmentary scenes sparks a sense of curiosity and intrigue.
One work that ties some of the disparate strands of the show together is Emma About To Put the Miniature Steed in the Miniature Folly—a playful echo of a rococo “fête galante,” where refined figures amorously cavort in bucolic landscapes. The elegant lady who is playing with a tiny version of the nearby pavilion (The Bluebird in the Folly) is none other than Emma Peel from the 60s British television series “The Avengers,” one of Kilimnik’s favorite glamour girls, an icon of feminine power (mod, brilliant, aristocratic and sexy). The “Steed” in Emma’s palm is a play on Kilimnik’s equestrian paintings, as well as the name of her partner John Steed from “The Avengers.” Emma who, as a genius-in-a-catsuit feminist idol, always had unrequited sexual chemistry with the reserved, ultra-English gentleman Steed, reigns over the toys onto which she can project her own fantasies and desires. Emma Peel could indeed be the alterego of the artist herself within the exhibition.
Kilimnik’s style could be described as coquet, a French expression for pretty and charming works that was used to both praise and dismiss rococo painters such as Boucher. Kilimnik has too often been overlooked by major museums, perhaps due to an air of frivolity. Yet, in her exploration of various forms of reverie and glamour, Kilimnik uses charm as a conceptual strategy, suggesting at once the power of the artist to enchant the viewer, but also the limitless power of the viewer’s imagination that can be triggered when charmed, yet never fully contained—if the viewer so chooses to be charmed.
Allison Unruh is a doctoral candidate at the Institute of Fine Arts.
