By Danielle Kelly
I must confess that I have a hard time with paintings. It’s tough to go head to head with centuries of tradition and experience a painting on its own terms. So when I entered the diminutive Jennifer Marie Gallery last Thursday and saw San Francisco-based artist Casey O’Connell’s selection of paintings, Five More Minutes, my first reaction was a bit knee-jerk: “More retro-naïve girly paintings? Ugh! Give me a break.”
But something else was going on here. It was like the world had shifted into perspective, and you became attuned to what really matters—an old book, a great love, a strawberry Popsicle. Five More Minutes offers the rose-colored experience of encountering something that fills a need you didn’t know you had.
O’Connell’s vaguely forlorn and coy figures are physically angular and somewhat flat. Evocative of Egon Schiele’s tender and honest treatment of the figure, they appear quite comfortable in their discomfort, pushed and pulled by the ether. The narratives are familiar. The title piece depicts a figure from behind being held by another, face pressed to shoulder, crown on head, toothbrush in hand. Who hasn’t wanted just five more minutes with a loved one? But it’s the artist’s unexpected visual choices and odd angles that make these scenarios interesting. A pillow fight in “Look Mom” is framed by a pair of legs hanging in the air, topped by boxers, behind which a young woman clad in her undies swings a pillow, feathers flying. “We Were Never Friends” is a profile of a young man, wearing a crown, unzipping the back of a young woman’s dress. The zinger here is the viewpoint: the figures are horizontal, floating in a field of turquoise toward the top of the picture plane, perhaps alluding to what’s to come. And all those crowns? For when we need a little dash of courage, compliments of the artist.
But don’t be fooled. The imagery isn’t what makes this work compelling. It’s that O’Connell is wrestling with paint. Her surfaces are thick with the history of their own making, layer upon layer of muck. The artist claims to work “blindfolded … layering each painting for three or four days” before she actually begins to search the surface for imagery, never planning a narrative but simply culling it from the paint itself. O’Connell wisely reveals this process, offering glimpses of something not very pretty underneath. Coupled with the physicality of the surfaces, this makes for a very tactile and immediate experience. The figures blend in and out of the background. Each painting is a material mixture of acrylic paint and oil stain, so a shape might simply be line-drawn, or take form through a confident mixture of heavy opaque paint and subtle staining. The work provides lots of surface interest and numerous small visual pleasures.
Not to say that these are masterpieces, but like meatier forebears—such as Kazimir Malevich and Philip Guston— O’Connell’s exertion is writ large and successfully integrated into the work. Her figures are almost excruciatingly intimate, present and vulnerable. We keenly feel that the artist is working out her stuff through all this paint, and is generously sharing the experience with us. “You’ve been here, right?” she earnestly seems to ask.
Then there’s the color. O’Connell makes some fairly bold monochromatic choices; the most striking being two paintings that are a kind of color field portraiture. “A Grown Up Dream” and “Priceless” each feature a demure young female in silhouette, floating in a seductive color field of yellows and pinks, respectively. Large areas of thickly applied paint in one color are interrupted by communities of smaller shapes in similar shades. The satisfaction of these delicate portraits lies in the visual experience of wending your way between registering the shapes and getting lost in a patchwork sea of vibrant hues, a surprisingly gentle back and forth.
Desperate, sweet and melancholy, these paintings are an honest portrayal of our most vulnerable moments while they joyfully manage to sidestep cynicism or bitterness. Yes, things get messy, but isn’t that what makes life good?
Five More Minutes
****
Through May 24
Jennifer Marie Gallery
101 E. Charlston Blvd., Suite 205, 686-3164
jennifermariegallery.com