ART CITIES:Brussels-Sam McKinniss
Liberated from the historical squabbles around painting’s primacy or lack of legitimacy, Sam McKinniss came of age as an artist with unfettered relationships to his medium and celebrity worship. If portraiture has always been about power, then McKinniss is the first artist since Elisabeth Peyton to convincingly merge “the singularity, preciousness, and longevity of the painted picture” with the ephemeral celebrity of his subjects, creating an oil-on-canvas fairytale of our present age.
By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Almine Rech Gallery Archive
McKinniss has emerged as a neo-Magical Realist, combining “the actual and the uncanny” transfiguring in his solo exhibition at Almine Rech Gallery in Brussels, the reality of the internet age into his depiction of the contemporary “Neverland”. Sam McKinniss paints in two distinct but complementary practices: representational works which are both seductive and funereal; and grey-scale abstractions. The two styles provide tension and counterpoint within his oeuvre. In his figurative painting, McKinniss works from photographs, found images as well as pictures he took. His subjects include reclining male nudes, floral still lifes, and images from popular culture. McKinniss develops a symbolist vocabulary for contemporary figurative painting; he sources material primarily from online image searching. Although there is a tendency to link McKinniss to painters such as Elizabeth Peyton and Karen Kilimnik (largely due to the confinement of much of their output to smaller scales) it is more enlightening to pair McKinniss with other contemporaneous practices such as Luc Tuyman’s gray-scale, funereal politics, Pablo Bronstein’s architectural Capriccios or Jamian Juliano-Villani’s hyper-real painted patchworks. What McKinniss’ work shares with this latter group of artists is a relationship to fact. McKinniss forges a symbolist vocabulary for contemporary figurative painting; he culls his source material primarily from online image searching, an intuitive process by which he reveals the relational network of his own media-saturated consciousness. Seemingly disparate pop cultural icons are portrayed without cynicism in the artist’s fluent painterly style. Via this earnest, elegant rendering, he draws out his subject’s shared, seemingly contradictory characteristics: each work is charged with simultaneous masculinity and femininity, the languid threat of violence and a sense of stoic ostentation. The artist’s abiding interest is in moments of unexpected emotional intersection, his bodies always taut with aggression and sexuality, defensiveness and vulnerability, pathos and humor.
Info: Almine Rech Gallery, 20 rue de l’Abbaye, Brussels, Duration: 10/1-28/2/19, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-19:00, www.alminerech.com
