Realism Emerges as a Painterly Alchemy That No Gadget Can Reproduce in Work by Caroline Walker, Leonard Baby

Caroline Walker: ‘The Holiday Park’Grimm Gallery, 54 White Street, New York, New YorkTo May 3, 2025Leonard Baby: ‘The Babys’Half Gallery, 235 East 4th Street, New York, New YorkTo April 26, 2025Two realist painting shows just opening at Tribeca and the Lower East Side demonstrate the slipperiness of the term. Both shows represent families, one in a holiday context, the other in historical, highly symbolized terms. Once again we see that the intent of the artist, the framing of the image, and the hand holding the brush is the biggest determinant of what is “seen.” The results are always compelling. Caroline Walker’s large canvases of Holiday environments at Grimm are haunted by a compositional monotony that seems intentional. If this is a holiday, it’s a strangely banal one. Never has such exacting skill gone into the framing of flatly artificial environments, a theme that has occupied Ms. Walker for some time. Set at Parkdean resorts in England, Ms. Walker is intent on telegraphing the buffed uniformity of resort facilities and landscapes, one that extends to the quiet invisibility of the staff. A working-class story is being told here. Every room, from the glossy arcade, the immaculate swimming pool and the “showbar” is designed to maximize the appearance of middle class, suburban leisure, all while minimizing the laborers, often women, behind the scenes. The artifice and uniformity of the décor, along with its uniformed caretakers, reads under Ms. Walker’s brush as loneliness. Never since Raymond Carver have the blue-collar blues been so faithfully documented.“Amusements” features a lone little girl absorbed in a driving simulation. She is flanked by other games and a claw machine, evoking Edward Hopper in its artifice and isolation. Yet it is also about the absorption of the very young into mechanical environments. The girl’s intense isolation is palpable. By contrast, “Cleaning Tables at the Boathouse” takes us into the life of a caretaker tidying up at the end of a shift. It’s a marked contrast from the young vacationer. It demonstrates how continuous labor undergirds every moment of an allegedly seamless vacation experience. This does appear to be the focus of Ms. Walker’s work: private moments of workers supporting vacationers who pay to be oblivious. It is part of a long-standing British class critique, made all the more interesting by her personal involvement with the process. Her voluminous studies in blue ink, devoted mostly to individual figures, capture compelling moments of labor that recall Picasso’s “Laundress,” or Jean Francois Millet’s “Gleaners.” The triumph of the show, however, would be “Rockpooling,” where children and their mother are at last out in the sunlight, exploring a living environment along the beach. Leonard Baby’s family portraits at Half gallery, at the East Village, tell the story of an entirely different microcosm. Raised in an extremely conservative and evangelical Colorado community, Mr. Baby grew up at odds with his queer identity, believing it to be “gross” and even subjecting himself to conversion therapy. Meticulously painted and laden with symbolism, Mr. Baby is not invested in giving us candid working-class moments so much as he is in symbolizing the complex drama of his upbringing. The “Babys” are his mother and four sisters, who he credits with protecting him. There is nothing naturalistic in Mr. Baby’s family portraits, suffused as they are with a surreal degree of gloss and precision. The figures hover on the edge of the uncanny. The hand of Balthus is undoubtedly present, as Mr. Baby admits himself, especially in the portrayal of his sisters. A palpable sensuality simmers beneath the exquisite façade of his figures. Leonard Baby, ‘Four Sisters,’ oil on panel. Courtesy Half GalleryThe signature painting of the show, “Four Sisters,” is almost a Kardashian tableau in its artful informality, showing all four siblings in the process of posing and preening in different attitudes of introspection and mild distress. One sister, staring off in profile into the distance, looks particularly formidable. A nude study hangs above the fireplace, beneath it a metal cupid with an arrow. In front of the assembled clan, lying on its side, is a wooden bilboquet. Mr. Baby refers to these sisters as his “angels” who helped him survive his youth. It’s strongly reminiscent of the religious symbolism of a Van Eyck. Mr. Baby has mentioned that the history of Western art is strongly entwined with the history of Christianity, a truism he mines assiduously while maintaining his own ambivalence. Mr. Baby’s strength lies in his ability to balance — much in the manner of a bilboquet — these strong contradictions and tensions: between surface and depth, between the real and the surreal, between the explicitly presented and the overtly implied. Mr. Baby seems to be forging a new contemporary mannerism. His self-portrait in underwear, with the tip of a sharp dagger placed melodramatically at his breast, calls to mind Lucretia, the noble Roman housewife who committed suicide after she was assaulted by Sextus Terminus. Mimicking this parable of ideal womanly virtue is campy to be sure, but it also calls out the deep wounding that is felt around matters of sexual identity. Rather than braying with obvious complaint, as so much queer art has done, Mr. Baby is content to show us nuance. In the documentary “Tim’s Vermeer,” inventor Tim Jenison wished to prove that all of the realistic artifice of Johannes Vermeer resided not in the painter’s hand or eye but in the devices and lenses he no doubt used. Yet the work of these two realists show that there is a painterly alchemy that no gadget can reproduce. Both the work of Ms. Walker and Mr. Baby show that “realism” has little to do with the “real” in this instance. It is rather, the confluence of minds, hands, and eyes that produce radically different visions. Painting continues to be a distillation of vision that goes beyond mere faithfulness to surfaces, delving deeper into the mysteries of the seen and the known.

Realism Emerges as a Painterly Alchemy That No Gadget Can Reproduce in Work by Caroline Walker, Leonard Baby

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