The conceit behind photorealism was the approximation in paint of photography's crystalline precision. A finely wrought streetscape by Richard Estes or a quirky still life by Audrey Flack fairly dared you to get up close to find a brush stroke.
Cindy Wright's paintings are not like that. Step forward a pace or two, and the glistening highlights on veins of fat are plainly daubs of white oil paint, and the morning stubble on a man's face resolves into thin gray strokes. The frankness of magnified scale prompts the expectation that the Belgian painter reprises the photorealist mode—what else would you expect from an oversized stack of raw-meat bricks?
No, Wright's writ goes further back in art history. Her exhibition at the Las Vegas Art Museum, comprising works from private collections and from Mark Moore Gallery in Los Angeles, has an Old Masterly air about it, minus the gilt frames. Her extreme close-ups of flesh muddy the mind's eye with all that her subject is heir to, whether she's painted the placidly slumbering face of "Untitled (Sleeping Man)" (2005), or his prospective breakfast, "Baconcube" (2004).
In her essay for the exhibition brochure, LVAM's director Libby Lumpkin processes Wright's approach through the codes of postmodern knowingness to see the painter's sometimes disturbing images as a form of "contemporary vanitás" painting, those Netherlandish still-life reminders of mortality stripped of their narrative contexts. Rather than a table-load of fruits and meats (accented, maybe, by a skull), Wright blows up one element. With "Meat 3" (2003), we peer into a gelatinous murk of meat and gristle that speaks of a depth beyond bone. In "Skin 1" (2004), the hand that might chop the meat is rendered as a monumental topographic map, whorls tracing ridges, a bruise-toned crease a river with tributaries.
That Wright upends the photorealist conceit with a painterly approach could be considered a perfectly postmodern conceit in itself—illusion turned illusive. But all she's really doing is painting well, expertly layering tones into luscious volumes like a painter from an age when one could prize realistic fidelity without contemplating the nature of illusion.
Lumpkin cites Wright's Flemish ancestor Van Eyck, but you could just as well find precedents in Rubens and His Age at the Guggenheim Hermitage Museum. Another might be Pieter Aertsen, an Amsterdam native who labored many years in Antwerp, where Wright honed her skills. Aertsen's 16th-century "inverted still lifes" hid narrative tales in the distance behind foregrounds of vividly rendered still lifes, the most celebrated example of which might be "A Meat Stall with the Holy Family Giving Alms" (1551).
No narratives intrude in Wright's paintings, but in a sense they seek similar ends. The lush volumes of rose and salmon in a stack of meat slices and the morning light stealing over the cheekbones of a sleeping man both speak of life's fragility. But this is not all her paintings do. The direct frankness of the portrait "Pieter Vermeersch" (2004) is both startling and absorbing. "Curtain" (2005) examines the cool, blue, backlit threads of a lace pattern. And in a nod to local culture, Wright pictures a casino cocktail server in "Vegas Girl" (2005), although this might be the least-remarkable picture in the show.
Oddly, Las Vegas gallery-goers find themselves treated simultaneously to exhibitions by two artists from the Mark Moore stable, although Tim Bavington's striped color-field paintings at G-C Arts Downtown are about as far-removed in idea and execution from Wright's work as they could be. Whereas Bavington's work erases any traces of the artist at work, Wright's paintings encourage you to find her hand at work in them, if only to remind you that the flesh she represents is tenuous.