The first time I saw some paintings by John Currin they appealed to me right away. I did not need a second look or to hear some long winded explination like from art school about why I should appreciate them. The simple fact is they connected to me and I picked up my first book on him.
He is an excellent painter but that is just incidental to his work. There are a lot of excellent painters in this world but skill alone does nothing for art. An artist has to have something to communicate, something to show beyond his talent as a painter or draftsman. John Currin definitely has something to show. He paints mostly women but that too I feel is mostly incidental. Men as a rule of thumb love to paint women. It's a tremendous lure to paint that which we find so beautiful.
To me, I love his work because with no more than a simple pose, or a well painted women with a heavily modeled pasty face, he is able to communicate the awkward nature of day to day life. Figures with uncomfortable inner thoughts and feelings show overly affected smiles or looks. Stamford After Brunch, Park City Girl, The Activists, and Brown Lady all have this feel to them. Something is lurking in the inner psyches of these people. Women they may be, but people they surly are and something is a bit off below the surface of their lives. The masks that we all put on are communicated with the actual heavily modeled pasty made up faces of some of the women.
There is also a restless longing in many of his paintings. Paintings such as: Lovers 1993, Lovers in the Country 1993, Portrait 1993, and The Never Ending Story. These paintings seem to show that something is missing from the lives of the men. In a few of them a woman is present but she seems to be there for her man, perhaps to help aid him in what ever way she can. The man in each case appears like some kind of bizarre perversion of Abe Lincoln meets Uncle Sam meets Colonel Sanders with some Mr. Rogers thrown in. These paintings, to me, have a very distinct American feel to them. All 4 paintings have clouds and appear to be set in large open spaces where the man is gazing far and wide while he thinks about what it is exactly that is missing from his life or his country. The men and women in the paintings may in fact be metaphors for America itself, looking lost like some odd flustered older man but with all the help and appreciation of a young mistress by his side.
Currin is most definitely pointing out what he likes and does not like about this world often in the same painting. Things are not clear cut black and white, good or bad, it's messier than that and more complicated.
Day to day life as a human is complicated. We all have these powerful brains and they ceaselessly function and generate thoughts and communicate ideas, impulses and urges almost all the time. I personally find life to often be quite awkward for people in general. Adulthood is mostly a veiled childhood where we think way too much about what others are doing, thinking, and how they are acting. many facades go up and come down. People see others and desire what they have, the spouce someone has, or their house, possessions, situation and the like. All the while we are bizarre animals with all sorts of odd functions that also function ceaselessly beyond our control. All the while we have the urge to sleep, eat, fornicate, and all this while we try and do better for ourselves and appear as normal as possible within the confines of what ever community we find ourselves in. For me John Currin's paintings show this day to day struggle we all have with the awkward nature of existence and the strains that having a large brain in a complex world put on a person with urges, and longings that often happen in direct contradiction to what is expected of one in this world, country, town, street, or home. Also there is the deeper thoughts that we mostly as a society tend to uncomfortably ignore. Where did we come from? Where did the universe come from? Why does anything exist at all? These thoughts are ones that as animals we are privileged to have. Still they have boggled man for ever and humans at home who are not great thinkers can contemplate this too. We all carry these unanswered questions around with us all the time. We may not know it but we carry a bit of fear with us as a result of these unanswered questions about existence and the universe every day. They are deep in the back of our minds. I sense this in some of Currin's paintings.
All this just scratches the surface of what I get from his paintings. Some of them are just beautiful portraits in their own rights and need not be viewed as more than that.
He is definitely one of the few great contemporary American painters alive today and he has his brush on the pulse of the odd facade that is exhibited with the awkward doppelgänger that is writhing just below the phony surface of this country.
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J. McDonald
John Currin the Complete Works.
Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on February 25, 2013
GEORGIOS CHATZOPOULOS
SUPER!!!!!
Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on November 2, 2015
