Blue Boy

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The New York Sun

Mark Tansey has not had a major exhibition in New York since 1997. Now he’s back, and he’s got the blues. Mr. Tansey (b. 1949) is known for his large, slick, and calculated monochromatic paintings that lift slyly from art history. In the past he has worked in reds, browns, greens, and ochre. The seven new, large-scale paintings at Gagosian Chelsea, all from 2003 or 2004, are in ultramarine blue. But they continue to pull from his one-note bag of visual tricks and art-world in-jokes that have been entertaining and perplexing art historians, critics, and aficionados for more than 20 years.


Mr. Tansey makes puns, comments upon, and questions the role of perception and realism in art. He buries amusing images and droll references in his paintings. The artist is most famous for his clever, illustrative, sepia-toned painting “The Innocent Eye Test” (1981), in which a landscape painting of cows is being unveiled by museum authorities before an actual cow in the museum. (This ridiculous work, a favorite of academics since it first appeared, is in the Metropolitan Museum of Art.)


Like Chuck Close, Mr. Tansey is an artist who, using photographic reproductions, meticulously plans a painting and then meticulously executes it. (“Executes” being the operative word.) The works can be interesting in a “Where’s Waldo” sort of way, but as paintings they are dead before they hit the easel.


Mr. Tansey mistakenly believes he is resurrecting painting and its role in postmodern, photography-dominated times. (To fit in, he makes paintings that look like tinted photographs.) Actually he and his champions clearly have no clue as to what the function of a painting is to begin with. Like so many artists bitten by the postmodern bug, Mr. Tansey does not know that painting, which never died to begin with, does not need his particular brand of artistic mumbo-jumbo.


Mr. Tansey treats the canvas as a game; composition as set of tricks; metaphor and allegory as ingredients that can be pulled willy-nilly from the store of art history and affixed to his own canvases. As an idea man, Mr. Tansey, whose parents were both art historians, is full of it. As an artist, he hasn’t got a clue.


These new paintings play out their subversive puns in snowy landscapes and seascapes. Like the artist’s older works, the recent paintings are filled with minutiae. Scraped, combed, and finessed, they pull viewers closer to find the hidden head of Karl Marx in the large snowball in “Snowman” or the philosophers’ portraits of Socrates and Ludwig Wittgenstein in the crags, crevices, and faceted mountain rock face in “Push/Pull.” Yet their tacky surfaces and airbrushed nuances are cold and unforgiving. The densely packed, heavily detailed paintings, for all the hours obviously clocked at the drawing board and, later, the canvas, are cerebral rather than visual.


“Wake” is, among other things, an updated version of Renoir’s “The Boating Party.” The great payoff of this canvas, in which a group of reveling society types party on a balcony overlooking the water, as five clandestine figures ride by on a boat, is the discovery of the portrait of James Joyce in the boat’s wake. Got it.


If there is more, I don’t care. I cannot get beyond the fact that none of the figures have weight to their bodies; that the glasses pop from the space as if they were in a separate painting; or that the drawing in the painting, especially of the water and the awning, is so confused that the painting flattens out and collapses in on itself spatially.


Mr. Tansey’s sophomoric reflections, reversals, ambiguities, and art world finger-poking supposedly add up to something that is both Old World and up-to-date. His new work, the press release states, “typifies the complexity of our age, when certainty seems more elusive than ever.” If the ongoing success of Mr. Tansey’s smug and sleazy paintings demonstrates anything, it is that the contemporary art world is gullible, fixating as it does on gamesmanship and easily graspable surfaces rather than real metaphors and complex structures. And so it continues to be duped by the childish shenanigans of flimflam men.


Until December 18 (555 W. 24th Street, between Tenth and Eleventh Avenues, 212-741-1111). Prices: The gallery declined to disclose its prices.


The New York Sun

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