Art Lies, Volume 23, Summer 1999 Page: 47
60 p. : ill. (some col.) ; 28 cm.View a full description of this periodical.
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Realism
CONTEMPORARY ART CENTER OF FORT WORTH
FORT WORTH
by Curtis MartinMost regular folks consider paintings that
"look like what they look like" to be the only
legitimate kind of art there is. If it's a painting
of a clown with a big bouquet of flowers in his
hand, and it really looks like a real clown
holding a real bunch of real posies-then
that's all it takes to make it good art. On the
other side of the fence, many people who are
more knowledgeable and educated about art
look down on realist work because they see it
as conceptually vacant and too easily {~1 -
understood to be of interest to their
sophisticated minds. In both cases, that of
the goober and that of the snob, the actual
quality of the art is overshadowed by the
technical skill it takes to pull it off. In
other words, they can't see the forest for
the tricks.
Truth be told, Realist painting is the
most deceptive, and in some ways the
most false, of all styles of art. And in these
days when the imitation of reality through
electronic media is taken completely for
granted, it can also be the most subversive.
Ample evidence of this can be found
in Real Art, a four person show which
may turn out to be the last exhibit
mounted by the troubled Contemporary
Art Center of Fort Worth.
Of the group, Vera Barnett without a
doubt creates the most disturbing work in
the show. Barnett's large canvases are basi-
cally highly detailed renderings of carefully
composed tableaus, still-lifes in effect. Of
course in and of itself, this is as traditional an
approach as there could be. Even her subject
matter is pulled from the traditional: for
example, the first couple in Adam and Eve, or
a suffering Christ in Crucifixion. What makes
her work so odd is her main choice of props to
illustrate the characters in these exquisitely
painted scenes: half-inflated inflatable sex
dolls. Even though we may recognize the
figures in the paintings as cheap blow-up sex
surrogates, there is nothing in their presenta-Vera Barnett
Crucifixion, 1998
Oil on canvas, 58" x 50"
Photo: Courtesy of the Artisttion that is in the least bit sexual. In fact, they
have a kind of innocent quality. The ambi-
guity this creates begs the question as to
whether the artist really has any idea at all how
unsettling and just plain fucking weird her
images are. It also adds greatly to their success.
John Hartley's lovely oil paintings achieve
a similar effect with a very different approach.
Rendered in a simple-but-luscious, soft-focus,Hartley's paintings of plastic toy army men,
enlarged to fill sofa-sized canvases, also
manage to be figurative and impersonal at the
same time. They look "real" in the sense that
we know they are accurate 3-D representa-
tions of recognizable objects from real life.
Their supposed reality is all the more decep-
tive, however, due to the fact that his
"people", like Barnett's, were artificial repre-
sentations in plastic before he even began to
artificially represent them with paint. But
instead of carrying with them the "perverted"
baggage of imitation sexuality, they reveal the
social-acceptance of imitation violence.
When you initially look at Kirk Haye's
work, each piece appears to be a border-
line-goofy little collage of junk a kid
might glue together in a daycare activity
hour. In The Whisper for example, scrap-
wood, corrugated cardboard, string,
construction paper and the like appear
to have been pinned and stapled
together on a bulletin board to create the
image of a wacky peg-legged bird. At
first glance, the pictures have a childlike
charm, but their real impact comes after
you take a closer look and realize that
what you're looking at is not cardboard
and string-it's nothing but incredibly
realistic representations of the bits of
trash in paint. Strangely enough, the
eye-fooling trompe l'oeil technique
makes the odd paper-and-string charac-
ters in Haye's painting seem more, not
less, "real" than they would if they were
actually paper and string.
Tom Pribyl has the most highly-
developed rendering ability of the four
artists in Real Art. The objects in his
stunningly beautiful paintings of non-
populated living rooms and kitchens,
look so "real" you want to take them out
of the frame and put them in your
pocket. But the chairs, sofas, and break-
fast tables that dot Pribyl's "interior
landscapes" are subtly twisted and out of
proportion, as though you were weaving
among them while suffering from a vision-
warping hangover. The clean anal, "realistic"
sheen of the execution, combined with the
obvious disregard for traditional rules of
perspective makes for work that entertains
both the eye and the brain without short-
selling either. And that's a good trick. O
ARTLIES SUMMER 1999 47
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Lightman, Victoria H. Art Lies, Volume 23, Summer 1999, periodical, 1999; Houston, Texas. (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth228053/m1/49/?q=%22Bryant%2C+John%22: accessed May 25, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; .