| There is nothing remotely dark about Leah Tinari’s recent solo show, “We Could Definitely Run For the Presidency,” at Mixed Greens. The artist’s work here doesn’t tackle any major issues and it certainly doesn’t take itself a bit seriously. Since her graduation from RISD in 1998, Tinari has consistently depicted the people, objects and moments she personally enjoys most, and this candid selection of color-saturated new works is hardly an exception. |  |
Leah Tinari Could Definitely Run For The Presidency – Whitney May
There is nothing remotely dark about Leah Tinari’s recent solo show, “We Could Definitely Run For the Presidency,” at Mixed Greens. The artist’s work here doesn’t tackle any major issues and it certainly doesn’t take itself a bit seriously. Since her graduation from RISD in 1998, Tinari has consistently depicted the people, objects and moments she personally enjoys most, and this candid selection of color-saturated new works is hardly an exception. The artist’s no apologies approach to painting only the most exuberant of her life’s own personal snapshots proves a standout this unseasonable winter in New York—if not for its technical proficiency then for its highly honest, die-hard party aesthetic.
For once, the well-dressed, shiny-haired and pretty hipster girls of Tinari’s oil and gouache on canvas works take a backseat, and to the very sloshes and swigs of colorful hard liquor that here make them grin quite so wide. By removing the backdrop behind many of her guffawing female figures in favor of blank canvas streaked with glistening purple, green and ochre-colored, semi-abstract mixed drink spills, the focus is all on the happy accident—on the chaos and spinning of a drunken Saturday night. Nothing serious, and certainly nothing to recall the morning after.
What is most refreshing about Tinari’s method is the fact that this painter isn’t afraid to take her cues from the haphazardly executed photographs that she may or may not remember having taken herself. Anyone who claims that an artist does best to work directly from life—never a photograph—hasn’t browsed through event after event as captured on Leah’s digital camera. Rarely posed, the photographs Tinari selects as the basis for her large-scale paintings encapsulate the awkwardness and flawed nature of each of her carefree subjects. These men and women are in the midst of the more trivial of their life’s actions, and Tinari means to depict them just this way.
These are the snapshots that you might ask a friend to tear up for their exposure not only of your temporary loss of composure, but also for the fact that your bra is showing there, that your makeup is smudged there, or that, as it turns out, your new bathing suit covers less surface area than originally estimated. These are the albums of images that you wish would disappear, but they are also the ones that show you at your happiest—your most inelegant.
Additionally, in works like Big Highlights and in series like her “Tequila and Blue Jeans Make For a Good Composition,” Tinari ultimately deems the photographic process compelling subject matter in and of itself. Big Highlights displays yellow and red streaks of glare emphasizing the effects that the apparatus of the camera add to the photographic image. The inclusion of these swirls and flashes of light illustrate the idea that the photograph is in fact more than just a matter-of-fact snapshot of a particular moment since it includes these additional visual glitches and anomalies not present in the real life experience.
Similarly, the serial nature of her “Tequila and Blue Jeans Make For a Good Composition” paintings reminds the viewer that the events depicted in these three works occurred in rapid succession—that they are visible here only as a product of Tinari’s trigger-happy photographing style. In each, a new drink has been poured, but the drinkers have had the time and the motivation to move very little since the last click of the camera.
Tinari’s unmotivated, clumsy, giggling and indulging characters would surely claim they could “definitely run for the presidency,” if only for the campaign trail after-parties. Here, youth, laughs, tequila and a digital camera are everything; neither politics nor the rest of society pose any significant roadblock.
