You’ve got a lot of work on your hands to persuade any contemporary gallery-goer that there’s much value to be had in some dude doing straight-up nude paintings of women. That’s most of what American painter John Copeland has to offer here – two big rooms of paintings of beautiful topless women. And one or two in just their bras.
Some of them are mirrored or doubled, some have their facial features obscured. They’re painted with a Frank Auerbach-y gloopiness, they’re rough and sensual. But so what? We’ve had literally thousands of years of nude art. We’ve had the Ancient Greeks, Botticelli, Titian, Rubens, Schiele, Freud – the list is endless. So much has been said and done with the nude – with the male-gaze of the female nude in particular – that you have to have a really special idea, and a really special execution, to make the time spent looking at your nude art worthwhile. This doesn’t have that.
There is, however, a room of non-nudes, and those work much better. These big paintings show dinner parties and street fights. They have a real air of violence, of things on the verge of falling apart, of an America rife with menace beneath a cracking carapace of party-time frivolity. You get a sense of life here, there are ideas, there’s purpose bubbling away. It just proves that you don’t have to take your clothes off to have a good time.
@eddyfrankel
