The protagonist of Russ Warren’s new paintings is a potato-faced poppet who is sometimes bald and sometimes sports a little patch of hair atop his pink head. Wandering in asexual, “New Image” nudity through a landscape that simultaneously manages to evoke Braque and Louisa Chase, he gets caught up in a series of allegorical encounters. Imagine a Balthus coloring book based on Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, and you have it.
Pushed out from the ground by shadows which, regardless of the landscape’s undulations, break in severe right angles, this character floats in and out of tableaux with titles like Lust and St. Sebastian. The former portrays him kneeling before a female with individually delineated strands of red hair à la Morris Hirshfield; the latter has him pierced by arrows, the butts of which are decorated with pasta strands masquerading as feathers.
What baffles me about these paintings are their classical allusions. I miss the point of tackling subjects like “Lust” and “St. Sebastian” when the last word was pretty much spoken five centuries ago by painters whom Bernard Berenson, rather generously by his rarified standards, referred to as “illustrators.” Why is Warren dragging his cartoony characters into such heady Renaissance climes?
There is no passion in his depiction of Lust, and there is nary a whiff of transcendence in his St. Sebastian. That’s okay; this is hardly an age for heroes. Passion and transcendence give people the heebie-jeebies. Now, “attitude” and “irony” are the thing (“energized” and “problematic,” their qualifiers). Still, I hate to see an artist applying an energized attitude and problematic irony to themes which, while no longer relevant to our age of immediate gratification, once stood for something significantly more ambitious than the existential void that swallowed them up. It’s like some hip architect sticking a mansard extension on the Vatican portico.
There are, however, two paintings in the show that are made of sterner stuff. Neither features a faux-naïf man in a summery faux-naïf landscape. Neither attempts to homogenize or denigrate a grander, gestural past. Instead, Warren moves into darkly emotive, expressionistically raked interiors. The stippled, agitated application of paint here has a psychological appropriateness that, in the other paintings, is simply technique. In Zeke in the Studio, an attenuated, faceless figure huddles cross-legged on the floor near a nightmare of a dog. They are in the center of a vast, barren studio. Framed in a doorway, its shadow slicing through the room, stands another figure (maybe visitor, maybe warder). In The Conformist, a crouching, skeletal man is caught disciplining a dog whose jutting penis is echoed in the knife or stick held aloft by the man. It could be argued that the man is playing with the animal, but the mood is so dark, so anxiously violent, that a reading of domination is unavoidable. The psychological immediacy of these two paintings makes allegory a secondary consideration. In their confrontational alienation, they suggest an artist capable of laceratingly original vision. Perhaps Warren’s other paintings were executed the way Dr. Jekyll swallowed antidotes to keep Mr. Hyde at bay.
—Richard Flood
