Portraits of Fractured Fables
The Paintings of James Greco
These new paintings by James Greco are a departure: a welcome divergence in the path of the known. Outwardly perverse and even horrific, they can also be viewed as pathetic and humorous. Each is part of a continual engagement with issues of mortality. Rendered as tone poems, they narrate the darker aspects of human nature—nightmares made graphically concrete. In them the hidden painter comes alive, as Greco returns to a complicity between formalism and access to the imagination in ways that had perhaps become alien to his practice. Greco takes aim at the beautiful, the pretty, the orderly, and the happy. These works are evidence of the struggle to achieve visual ideas. They are edgy, contentious, and through inhabiting a limited physical area, they still achieve much. More than anything they leave a lasting impression of intentionally unsafe spaces. Too much has been made of art as therapy. Art necessarily expresses darker aspects of our natures, but not to expunge. There is no getting rid of the imagination. It’s what makes us human. If it comes out macabre, well that’s what was in there. The world takes the form from our minds. Greco is fine with this. He wants the work to be dangerous. He’s not afraid of wanting to be ugly.
Consider the image that anchors each: an axe head buried in the stump of a tree whose wooden center is a the Smiley face of the caricatured everyman; a strange blue sap flows out from the center of the cut, while nearby, a trio of poisonous mushrooms blooms in the moonlight. The murdered face glows in the dark light a miniature sun, giving off a valence of precious intensity as it dies. In another image, the Smiley is dismembered and bloody, floating under the noonday sun, slowly sinking into dark waters, half his face in shadow. In another, a vase of half dead and wilted flowers stands, presenting its lifelessness as a symbol. Its stems are entwined with a green snake glaring malevolently with venom dripping from its fangs. In another, a person’s face is replaced with a mangled assortment of images that resemble a briar patch of the subconscious: a smoking pipe, red-eyed and fanged version of Mickey Mouse, a large poinsettia flower with a gazing eye at its center, and beneath them, a forked tongue lolling around. Atop the all a straw hat that looks like it’s about to launch into space.
Fables in their original form are stories meant to impart a childishly simple moral tale. But symbols can also embody a fable-like quality. Their role in society places us in relation to a one-dimensional idea of how to act. The Smiley is one such symbol that seems ever-present in scenarios that present an everyman content with his place in life, happy somehow despite all the calamities and pressures that are part of the experience of world events and personal issues in contemporary life. Since the 1950’s it has represented this societal ideal, promoted by corporate America, and taking in a widespread popular appeal in the 1960’s and again in the 1970’s. Since then it may have lapsed into obscurity, but remains present as the first of the emoticons and emojis to be used ubiquitously on the internet as an alternative form of non-verbal communication. Popping up everywhere as it does, it becomes a target for critical attention from artists like Greco. Likewise, images of cutesy caricature, like those suggestive of Disney characters, become fable-like icons for our time. Such Icons and narrative instances interact from one image to the next, creating a serialized conflagration in which we are placed in direct confrontation with auguries of transcendent violence. They are an expunging of aspects that otherwise might haunt the artist, but made real by James Greco they take their power out the mind and into the world.
