Amber Boardman’s exhibition “Dude” assembled twenty-two slyly funny oil paintings with the fluent paint handling and cartoonish figuration we’ve come to expect from her work. One of my favorites was Baggage Competition, 2023, which gave me a rueful reminder of the outlandish amount of time and money I had recently spent sourcing trekking gear for a vacation. The canvas depicts a row of five blockish figures from behind, exaggerating their bulging backpacks and dangling hiking paraphernalia. Overburdened with adventure-travel consumables, these nature tourists appear poised to assault a snowcapped peak rising timidly before them—as if getting ready to crack a nut with a sledgehammer.
Since moving to Sydney from the United States in 2012 and following an early career in commercial animation, Boardman has habitually addressed contemporary internet and lifestyle cultures via the hap-tic plasticity of neo-expressionist facture. The pictures in “Dude,” described in Boardman’s catalogue essay as “piles of objects,” were all essentially still lifes, yet they tell, as she explains, the story of a fictional character, a “serial subculture hobbyist . . . into coffee, hiking gear, sports and its trophies,” and subject to the “ebbs and flows of love relationships.”
In Trophy Melt, 2022, gold cups and every kind of sports ball imaginable form an oozing, coagulated mass tipping forward Cézanne-like on a tabletop. Brass Knuckle and Wedding Ring Collection, 2023, indexes the extreme poles of romance, with sparkling renderings of these contrarily signifying items nestled side by side in a plush pink ring-display case. The oil-on-panel Spilt Milk Crypto Fortune, 2023, gestures to a souring of cryptocurrency speculation. An open drawer flush with the picture plane reveals three USB sticks—often used to store crypto wallets—swimming in a cartoonish puddle of spilled milk. The Rock of Sisyphus, Chasing Gains, 2023, likewise wryly deflates aspirational striving, showing a huge boulder pierced by a barbell dominating a somber-hued gym. Clear enough: Body-pumping obsessiveness replays the Greek myth of the man condemned by the gods to an underworld eternity of futile labor, rolling a rock up a mountain only to have it tumble back down again.
Though a still life typically represents inanimate objects, those populating Boardman’s paintings incarnate a fleshy, scintillating, or morphing vitality familiar from cartoon animation. The last was especially apparent in seven small, square oils on panel, lined up along one wall. Unlike the recognizable object traces of a caricatured internet bro in other paintings, five of the series depict object ensembles—sculptures, according to the works’ titles—that defied identification. Swirling semitransparent snakes of blue, white, and red pigment explode from a box in Red Hot Sculpture, 2023, while Unruly Sculpture, 2023, shows a mesh of tubular forms suspended between compression and eruption. Contained Sculpture, 2023, portrays a clutch of mysterious abstract forms tightly huddled together on a white field. These pictures speak as much of the artist flaunting the visceral materiality of oil paint as of a dude hopelessly torn between disciplined and excessive drives. Rather than simply excoriating twenty-first-century lifestyle fads and consumerist churn, Boardman’s smart, visually diverting, relatable paintings squeeze equal measures of satire and pathos from the life world we all currently negotiate.
