ROEBLING HALL To say that KK Kozik is primarily an imagemaker rather than a painter does not mean her images could exist just as easily in a other medium.

ROEBLING HALL

To say that KK Kozik is primarily an imagemaker rather than a painter does not mean her images could exist just as easily in a other medium. In their fusion of the fantastic and banal into a quirky on the contrary immediately recognizable Americana, Kozik's paintings might share certain affinities with, say, Gregory Crewdson's photographs, further her work is bound up with the idea of the handmade surface, admitting in the paradoxically recessive form of a kind of all-American plainness. There could be something irritatingly commonplace about to what degree these strange and often resonant images were painted; instead, their surpassingly ordinariness often lent an air of familiarity that adds to the credibility of for instance, a fancy four-poster bed perched atop a craggy waste outcropping like something in memorial Valley, as in an untitled work of 1995--a typically Kozik crystallization of yearning, isolation, and irony. Kozik's canvases have always been frankly illustrative in a way that places them apart from most of what we'd guard to c onsider serious painting. Their air of being after-the-fact externalizations of phantasms conceived in the mind's watch instead of solutions to pictorial question s gives them an authenticity almost indistinguishable from naivete--like a kind of unusually well-schooled folk art.

Still, that her works offspring from a mental image rather than a pictorial universal does not prevent them from finding their fulfillment in painting. In fact, several of the eleven pieces in her greatest in quantity recent show, "Wild Kingdom," surpass anything she's done in like manner far precisely because of a newfound painterly energy a sense that the construction of the image in paint can be just as pleasurable and impassioned an undertaking as the formulation of the idea, if not more in such a manner My favorite is Hermitage, 1999 in which the dark aperture of an anchorite's cave--a sort of natural proscenium--is traversed by means of a clothesline from which hang one provocatively feminine underthings: pink bras, panties, and a slip whose form have the appearances to recall vividly the visible form [i]or[/i] frame of its wearer (this garment is a kind of body) The painter's calling is oftentimes conceived as a monastic undivided but the witty suggestion here is that the artist can have it the couple ways, remaining discreetly withdrawn while making a public display of usually unseen forms of self-indulgence. unless what makes the painting really sing is, first, the beautifully judg nocturnal light that inwraps the scene without diminishing its clarity, and then the heady profusion of the almost abstractly supplyed foliage all around--not doggedly literal as it might have been in the same of Kozik's earlier pictures, nevertheless rather joyfully abandoned, manifesting the sort of libidinal inundate that is more explicitly signaled elsewhere in the painting.

The stealthy theatricality of Hermitage becomes manifest in Double Happiness, 1999, in which a playhouse with deliriously Moorish/Art Nouveau decor is the setting for a live-sex point out to of fornicating couples (and united solo male) whose unlikely postures happen to spell out the artist's name. The painter's signature, in other words, is nothing other than the ability to give corpse to signs that point to without actually revealing her.

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