Gregory J. Peterson
writes:
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Damon Lehrer Courthip 2001,
Oil on linen, 30 x 28 inches, courtesy Tatistcheff Gallery,
New York
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The Tatistcheff Gallery, Chelsea, has a track record
of promising emerging realists. Last season's hit show, for instance,
was of small works by Katy Schneider. But this exhibition of recent
works by Massachusetts artist Damon Lehrer is nothing less than awe-inspiring.
Damon Lehrer is a figurative painter who has developed a deeply psychological,
narrative voice unparalleled in his generation. Lehrer's previous
one-man shows at Boston's Pepper Gallery have demonstrated an astonishing
depth and variety of subject matter, with penetrating emotional insight
and masterful technique, and each show has displayed growth and maturity
over his previous efforts. (This reviewer first encountered Lehrer
at Pepper about five years ago and has collected a number of his earlier
works.) Reviewing his show there last fall, the Boston art journal
artsMEDIA went so far as to predict that he would become more interesting
than Lucian Freud. Lehrer's New York debut is a breakthrough for the
artist.
I agree that the work can evoke Freud along with other leading contemporary
realists - Jack Levine for his sardonic wit, and Paul Cadmus for his
mastery of narrative and pageantry, to name just a couple. But Lehrer
has firmly developed his own style through an assimilation of art
history and a keen observation of nature. Additionally, I find there
is a layer of confessional discourse in Lehrer, of subconscious fears
and longing, absent in these other masters.
In Damon Lehrer's visual dreamworld, women with their tender enticements
are ever-present, always sensuous, often luscious, but inaccessible,
behind a metaphorical glass or beyond the fingertips. His women are
seductive, intelligent and commanding forces. One recurring theme
of Lehrer's is that of a young man's struggle to impress a woman,
either through battle with another man, or through performing some
ancient courtship ritual in an edgy contemporary setting. Yet one
senses that, like the little match girl, Lehrer's men are doomed to
peer through the glass but never taste, much less possess, the delicacies
that lie behind. In the current show, New House [see inside
cover] depicts a lithe, long limbed brunette prancing toward the
viewer, stunning and delectable, bathed in a theatrical spot light,
oddly strutting between two sofa chairs in a middle-class living room,
a red veil floating behind her. She rightly belongs among the nude
dancers of the Folies Bergeres. Such luxury is alien in a tiny apartment,
which in any event would not be equipped with theatrical arc lamps.
She is a vision displaced from her natural setting; it is the artist-dreamer
who envisions her and transplants her there. Though he "sees"
her, he can never touch her.
Courtship is a poignant example of the mating struggle in
Lehrer's oeuvre. A hapless man waves a red cape or flag as though
to beg the attention of a female, but that "female" is merely
a seamstress' headless dress form clothed in a woman's blue velvet
jacket. Is this a rehearsal, or is this the man's conviction of what
it is like to woo all women, and his understanding of how far he is
likely to get? In Nature one young man appears to wrestle another,
or has he just attacked the other while the second was in the process
of performing a backflip to impress a passing female? The men are
exerting themselves all out, and the one in the superior position
is losing his trunks, yet the woman barely bothers to turn and give
them a glance. Fun and Games depicts two young women frolicking on
the shoulders, and at the expense of, the two men supporting their
game. The men bear the women on their knees, necks bent and suffocating
under their miniskirts.
Falling Man, not as successful as other works in this show,
depicts a man with a canine head wearing ballet slippers, floating
Chagall-like over a large lurcher racing dog. Such imaginative painting
stretches beyond the observable world where Lehrer's work is more
comfortably grounded.
These moderately-sized, parable-vignettes are developments and refinements
of Lehrer's recurrent themes, but what really marks a significant
breakthrough in Lehrer's Tatistcheff show is the mural-sized (108
x 198 inches) triptych Reunion. This heroic pageant embraces
fourteen figures, including a dog. The center panel takes the form
of a contemporary, secular Deposition scene. An injured worker, possibly
fainted or near death, is lifted down from a makeshift scaffold by
a band of young, multicultural female co-workers. The side panels,
which are both integrated with and independent of the central panel,
are extensions of the momentous central event. The panels are unified
in their airy, mountainous setting, but the figures and background
details only partially match up, as though they were still photos
from the same roll of film, but shot a few moments apart. The theme
of the "fallen" actor is echoed in the right panel by a
slumbering young female about to receive a (faux?) ermine covering
from an intense blond man. In the left panel the artist gazes out
at his viewers while seated beneath an American flag.
Dogs are ever-present in Lehrer's canvases. They evoke the transparent
sincerity and guilelessness absent in people. They are Lehrer's Greek
chorus, commenting on the follies of the humans around them; sensitive
and noble but possessed of a longing all their own.
Like the young men enacting Lehrer's courtship rites, in this New
York debut Lehrer makes an all-out, go for broke effort to win the
respect of the art world. But unlike his struggling gentlemen, this
artist is securely in command.
Gregory Peterson is a New York corporate lawyer who collects and
lectures about contemporary realist painting.
What
do you think?
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