ANGELA DUFRESNE – PARLORS AND PASTORALS
2012-09-10In most instances, the paintings have been executed alla prima. Through these single, sustained sessions, Dufresne animates familiar subjects in unexpected ways, generating “cover” versions of her own as well as a sense of emotional urgency.
What begins as a riff expands, through layered association, to a dense, lushly symphonic scale. In Lady David-Rosemary Angeles in a Golden Swamp, the artist inverts the gender of Bernini’s biblical David, combining portraits of her mother and herself, and isolates the torquing figure against a backdrop inspired by an Albert Bierstadt landscape as well as trees from the Hudson Valley. An exploration of Tiépolo’s The Banquet of Cleopatra turns into Banquette Concerto with Head; the balustrade in the background of the original Baroque painting becomes a rope bridge, the table centerpiece a severed head, an exploratory mark Condoleezza Rice.
Dufresne’s investigations emerge not from fandom or homage but the impulse to inhabit known material and discover unexpected points of connection. In merging contradictory or improbable elements – Buster Keaton at a film screening of John Singleton Copley’s Watson and the Shark, for instance, Dufresne erases the lines between pop vernacular and fine art, spectator and performer, memory and imagination.
Opposite – Shopswine with Hairstyles and Art Storage, 2011
Exhibition runs through to October 6th, 2012
CRG Gallery
548 West 22nd Street
New York
NY
10011
