Eric Legris at 1969
Eric Legris
Quotidian/Episodes: Eric Legris + Sara Rahmanian curated by Yoab Vera
1969 Gallery
January 13 - February 13
In the grand historical scale of humanity’s artistic production, canvas painting is relatively new — half a millennia — but it has seized and maintained authority as the medium of art par excellence. It turns out that it is not the paint and only somewhat the canvas that enthralls, but the four joined spans that form the inner frame. We flagging moderns still cling to the scaffold of our epoch’s youth.
Legris has stretched tapestries that flit in and out of legible imagery over those four bars. They are rendered in aggressively colored yarn (Kirchner comes to mind) on gauzy black fabric with broad margins through which the support is revealed.
Paintings take up details from the tapestries, meticulously executed in a disquieting honeycomb impasto that impersonates weaving. There is something of the forced, polished delight of Fragonard. Beauty, or at least the desire for it, is present here in an impenetrable, aggressive form, already on its back foot.
It’s possible that these pictures sourced from film stills are just another instance of the cheap trick that pushes a kitsch image through multiple layers of distortion until it becomes strange enough to resemble the avant-garde. They succeed, though, because the problem they take up is not reproduction but painting itself: the uncertain ability of canvas painting to be true. The uncertain desirability of truth.
You can stretch anything over those bars and it will resemble art. But to what end? Mimesis is stretched to its limits in Legris’ paintings. What madness drives one medium to so cloyingly impersonate another? What vengeful despair produces these pockmarked apparitions? These provocations are an accomplishment.