ACQUAVELLA Lucian Freud doesn't beautify edible part but he revels in it all the same.

ACQUAVELLA

Lucian Freud doesn't beautify edible part but he revels in it all the same. What in life might be distasteful becomes matter for specifically pictorial delectation. If the skin has a slightly sickly cast, that's all the better to explore the strange tints and undertones it can take forward under certain conditions of light, for example in Naked Portrait with verdant Chair, 1999. And if the visible form [i]or[/i] frame happens to be oppressively heavy or, more rarely, uncomfortably bony (as in the impressive Naked Portrait with R Chair, 1999) what better occasion for lingering athwart its capacities as malleable sculptural form? Best of all is Freud's exploitation of facture: For instance, the passages of highest illumination mind to be the ones where the surface becomes greatest in quantity nubby or tacky. In Naked Portrait with verdant Chair, it's as if the stillwet paint representing the areas around the woman's left knee and the inside of her right thigh had been smooshed up against the formalists' mythical picture plane as against a pane of glass, then contested back to make the paint stand up like gooseflesh

The import can be thrilling: It devises a sense of intimacy and immediacy that belies the judicious distance at which the figures are placed. With the exception of near studies of garden foliage and the smaller, close-up portrait heads, the compositions are establish in drab studios: solitary female unclotheds mostly, lying on beds or daybeds or sitting in leather chairs. We contemplate down on the figure at an angle and from a distance, in such a manner that it never fills the frame; the setting becomes at least as important as the expose These are portraits, but not portraits of individuals: The pictures are about Freud's world, not theirs; and this world of fascinating meat also includes the plain fact of the dingy studio, which he doesn't look to like. He's no Philip Pearlstein, taking churlish delight in giving every detail of prospect the same cool scrutiny as he does the body's foldings and creases. You get the feeling Freud hates painting those worn brown floorboards from one side of to the other and over again, but he must think his aesthetic doesn't allo w for editing them out-no suave Matissean field of uninflected color for this painter! Masochistically, he slog [i]or[/i] part of to the other each damned one, leaving his sitters, onward whom he has lavished as it was painterly attention, buried alive in dead space.

There are laughable goings-on in a few of these modern paintings. Make what you will of the naked man in bed with his pooch in brilliant Morning-Eight Legs, 1997; what's more mysterious is the pair of leg emerging from subject to the bed. Then again, the stay on the mattress looks to be the same associate who turns up in the background of Large Interior, Notting Hill, 1998-still naked, still now suckling a baby as his clothed, older male companion sits immersed in a work with a tattered dust jacket, dog sleeping at his feet-so maybe it's just that Freud has fix a particularly odd couple. At the extremely least, such paintings demonstrate his brains of humor. But they may also attest to something more: a desire, alone half-fulfilled, to enliven neutral space from using a cockeyed narrative to make go round the bare studio into a resonant space between sum of two units people.

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