Even those who don’t know very much about visual art are familiar with the Cubist approach to the human body. Pablo Picasso liked to present a person from many angles at once, and compress three-dimensional form into a two-dimensional frame. No matter what step she’s on, that nude descending a staircase comes at us all at once. We know we’re looking at an individual person, even if it’s never clear which of those fields of color represent the present moment and which are afterimages, projections, and vapor trails. Representing human beings like this guarantees that there’ll be distortions: facial features in strange places, unexpected angles, duplicates and odd subtractions, clashes between heads, necks, and torsos, the shuffling of expressions, and the surprise and disquiet that comes when an obviously human figure doesn’t look much like a human at all.
Picasso didn’t have a video camera. If he had, he might have chosen to capture the body in motion on a reel. But there’s good reason to think he might have stuck to the brush. His early paintings betrayed his fascination with African art — masks, in particular — and the ways in which nonwestern painters and sculptors were able to reflect the passage of time in the static objects they made. Painting, as it turns out, never sits still. In “Catharsis,” an entertaining solo show at IMUR (67 Greene St.) up until the first of August, the young oil painter Wesley Pierre gives us human figures on the move, even when that movement is mostly taking place in their minds. The exhibition, shrewdly curated by Janbi Kaghado, presents Pierre as a face-shuffler interested in the effects of time, change, and precarity on the human psyche. The amalgamated heads and bodies of his subjects contain many expressions and postures at once, but there’s a common weightiness about them. His canvases radiate a deep feeling of restlessness and unease — but possibility, too.
They can also be quite funny. In “Chivalry,” a portrait of a bouquet-clutching suitor on a tall, narrow panel, the character appears to be looking in several directions at once. We see him downcast, dejected, perhaps, after the rendezvous doesn’t go well. He’s also giving us some side-eye, pondering his next step. One great central eye near the crown of his bald head stares straight as us as if he’s caught in the high beams. He’s alert and possibly terrified; he’s disappointed; he’s looking for an escape route. His closed and angled shoulders, long legs like the bottom of a Corinthian column, and his tight grip on the stems of his flowers tells us he’s determined to stand his ground, even as his face appears to be running away. Pierre has given us a portrait of date-night energy in full, and a would-be lover it’s hard not to sympathize with.
How do we read a painting like this? The conventional approach is to do it from right to left. We can follow the expressions from one side of the compound face to the next like we’re scanning words in a book. Treating “Chivalry” like that unlocks a tale: the initial wide-eyed excitement at the beginning of an encounter, the furtiveness when things feel off, and the sadness at the end of an unconsummated night. But (and this is what oil painting does better than any other medium) it’s also possible to appreciate this image as a moment containing multiple outcomes within it. We get a portrait of the branching paths an evening can take, and the many emotions that unfold within a single gesture.
The best examples of this technique are visible in Pierre’s paintings of physical activities. In “King Pin,” a wonderfully dramatic diptych, one red-gloved boxer fells another with a blow. The two pugilists duke it out in front of scores of faceless human figures, each given its own distinct excitable posture by the painter. The champ has an aura of cool blue; his downed opponent radiates caution-yellow from the mat. The three-eyed, two-nosed hitter, whose fused expressions suggest determination, impassiveness, and maybe a hint of cruelty, scrambles the face of his challenger, and, with an act of sanctioned violence, takes him from surprise to resistance to resignation. Overtones of Picasso and Jacob Lawrence are evident in the painting, but it’s also reminiscent of the ringside scenes of George Bellows. It comes at the viewer with the velocity of a thrown punch.
Sedentary scenes are no less volatile. “Study” is Pierre at his most sly: a figure at a desk, legs parted, lamp on, and shoulders slanted as if he’s preparing to slide directly into his book. His face is a cascade of eyes and questing apertures, drooping from a rounded forehead to the pages he thumbs through. It looks as if he’s wearing a bib made of eyeballs and viscera. There’s even an iris and pupil on the back of his hand.
Yet there’s nothing horrifying about the scene. The main character isn’t melting or disintegrating. He’s becoming one with his reading material, and gaining in alacrity as he does. His desk stands on narrow dowels, and it feels like he’s holding the scene, and his world, together with his knees. He’s as oblivious to the world outside his desk as he is attuned to the text. In “Playing Myself,” the subject of the portrait is so thoroughly conflated with the art he’s making that his head slips from his torso and pours through the bell of his saxophone. The agglomeration of faces that protrudes from the instrument looks out in all directions — except at the crowd that surrounds the performer.
These ideas reach their apotheosis in “Chess,” the best painting in the show. A jagged figure in black sits at a tiny board and ponders his next move. The character hunches over the board like a crane ready to strike at the water. His shoulders meet in a point well over his head, his legs bend in right angles at his knees, and again at his ankles; he gives an impression of great solidity, but he’s bent as severely as a wire coat hangar, and he looks like he could snap at the joints. At least four eyes are set in a face that appears to be pointing in three directions at once. He cannot decide: should he advance his pawns or construct a defense?
Once again, Pierre summons a procession of emotions, including exasperation, wariness, and paranoia, and tucks them into the same oblong face. Everything about his posture imparts gravity to the scene. Pierre makes us feel that the game is important and worthy of the character’s obsession. Yet both the board and the player balance on narrow columns barely wider than a stick. Caught up in the game, he doesn’t even recognize how precarious his position is.
It does make sense that a painter so committed to showing us a multiplicity of perspectives on a single face would be suspicious of obsessive focus. And maybe Pierre’s characters don’t have to look out so hard. Almost all of them have a guardian spirit hovering over their heads in the shape of a Heisenberg-style pork pie hat. Pierre’s headwear is tiny: it’s usually no bigger than the eyes on the faces of his subjects. Yet they’re radiant anyway. They hover above these characters like lightbulbs floating over the foreheads of cartoon inventors. The more Pierre’s people seem to be thinking, the higher the hats float. The inspired game-player of “Chess,” self-possessed and driven to solve the puzzle, keeps his pork pie hat aloft effortlessly; the sad subject of “The Blues” has a hat that slumps on the side of his head and drips down past his ear like candle wax. Even the boxing champion of “King Pin,” bent on a knockout, keeps a hat-spirit within sight. It’s got a seat of its own in the audience, shining there, displacing the rest of the crowd, so fiercely backlit in yellow paint that it feels like the secret star of the diptych.
Not everything in “Catharsis” is so inspired. Some of these paintings are downright murky. Pierre isn’t always the best at picking colors: the drab backdrops can swallow the subjects and hide contours of their faces that, I suspect, the painter would really like us to notice. Sometimes his pelican-eyed protagonists get a little lost in their own swirls. Yet when this show hits, it does in such a satisfying way that even the neighboring canvases that don’t completely work begin to make resonance. Moreover, for an artist who grounds his work in the mysteries of time and identity, Pierre has a great sense of humor. Any time it seems like gravity is taking over, levity bails him out. Kaghado, an unrepentant ironist himself, seems to have found a kindred spirit. This is Pierre’s first solo show, and it’s something of a maiden voyage for the curator, too. Here’s hoping this team will bring us more provocation soon.
(IMUR is open from 3 p.m. until 7 p..m. on Thursdays and Fridays and 2 p.m. until 6 p.m. on Saturdays. There’ll be an artist talk on August 1 at 4 p.m. That’s also the closing party. Summer shows: blink and you’ll miss them. So… don’t blink.)
Tris McCall regularly writes about visual art (and other topics) for NJArts.net, Jersey City Times, and other independent publications. He's also written for the Newark Star-Ledger, Jersey Beat, the Jersey City Reporter, the Jersey Journal, the Jersey City Independent, Inside Jersey, and New Jersey dot com. He also writes about things that have no relevance to New Jersey. Not today, though.
Eye Level is an online journal dedicated to visual art in Jersey City, New Jersey. A new review will appear every Tuesday morning at 8 a.m., and there'll be intermittent commentaries posted to the site in between those reviews.
Eye Level is made possible by an Andy Warhol Arts Writers Grant.
