Thomas Jeppe

Frames serve a hybrid function as both delimitations and integral parts of the images they bound. For the past several years, Thomas Jeppe has painted the bottom halves of his wooden frames white, both underscoring and leveling their relation to the wall. Each of the twelve large-format paintings on view here also partakes of the same narrative frame: An anthropomorphized pig finds a pig mask, puts it on, sets out into the world, and has various adventures before meeting a little pig in a pigpen and taking it home, where they fall asleep. Jeppe’s innocent style, appropriated from children’s-book illustrations, keeps a lid on the fable’s more explosive implications. But there’s no mistaking the artist’s concern with our contemporary obsession with identity and how it is converted into symbolic capital. Who’s the pig here? And what’s the connection between the two visions of pighood?

In Jeppe’s intelligent compositions, the masked pig—which, as such, is intrinsically double—is perpetually reduplicated. The Mask (Café) (all works 2020) includes a discreet reflection of the pig reading a newspaper in the window of a bistro, while The Mask (Home 2) makes the point more bluntly: Much of the pictorial space is taken up by a mirror (enclosed, it should be noted, by an opulently decorated frame) in which we see the two piggies arriving at the masked pig’s home. Such picture-within-a-picture devices figure in the works with some regularity, further highlighting their mediated quality: Each comes bordered by a black margin inside a white edge inside Jeppe’s idiosyncratic frame. And although the paintings, individually and as a narrative in pictures, leave a lot of room for interpretation, the stylization of the frame flags the masked pig’s projected identity as no less stylized and performative than our own.