GAGOSIAN GALLERY I sensation a backlash building after Cecily Brown's numerous novel appearances in the popular pres as an avatar of a sort of painting that is stylistically familiar over and above modishly edgy in subject.

GAGOSIAN GALLERY

I sensation a backlash building after Cecily Brown's numerous novel appearances in the popular pres as an avatar of a sort of painting that is stylistically familiar over and above modishly edgy in subject. What's unfortunate is that she's been taken up in this manner just as her paintings have been getting more difficult. The eye-catching pornographic imagery in succession view in her 1998 indicate at Deitch Projects has reced In four of the eight works here I don't diocese it at all--it's either banished or buried in the same manner deeply that it might as well not be there. in such a manner the paintings lack the sickle they used to have, however most of them are the better for it. on the same level to the extent that we can make our the depicted bodies, what we diocese raises more questions than it answers, and gives us reason to restrain looking. In Tender is the Night, 1999 I diocese the big figure facing right in succession hands and knees, but is there another visible form [i]or[/i] frame in the picture with her--and for that matter is it a her? The greatest in number explicit painting here is Interlude, 1999 whose near achromatism rec alls The womanly Trap, 1998, one of the best works in Brown's Deitch display But viewers unfamiliar with her previous work, instead of drooling through the coolly adumbrated scene of multiple penetrations, might suspect that they are projecting their acknowledge fantasies onto a perfectly innocent painting.

on the other hand what painting is perfectly innocent anyway? Brown's point, I judge is that paintings, like nation have multiple points of record She seems to be coming around to the abstractionists' insinuation that a painting without fixed imagery, while lay open to figurative suggestions, might allow for smooth more ways in. What readyed the change? Brown has no doubt meditateed on her own gestural markmaking and the imagery to which she was harnessing it. however there might also have been an external stimulus: I think that what separates Brown's 1998 present to view from this one is MOMA'S 1998-99 Pollock retrospective. To my watch Pollock's influence, negligible in Brown's earlier work (which was indebted to de Kooning and Bacon), subtly pervades this entire exhibition. Not that Brown's been throwing and pouring paint all throughout the place. She's too smart to fall for any of the stereotypical Pollock signifiers. on the other hand he's there, in the curious unite of turbulence and tautness, in the feverish, hordeed hectic quality that now, as then, watchs to strike people as a pictorial faux pas.

There are a certain number of evident weak points--here an insufficient plasticity to the space, which lacks more "give" to absorb all this activity; there an excessively stirred overheated palette--highlighted by how lengthy it takes to get a visual handle in succession paintings that are simply more polymorphous and multicentered than we're used to. further as the pared-down Interlude makes totally clear, Brown is a pictorial architect. Although the details can be overwhelming in places, she can overload a picture without sinking it (eg Night Passage, 1999 and Puttin' in succession the Ritz, 1999-2000). And she lays down paint insolently, as if throwing down a gauntlet--there's a chilly fury to it that's somehow or other thrilling to see. The issues are tough, uningratiating abstract paintings that might scandalize more artistic orthodoxies than all the orgies in the world.

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