by Mona Longpre
Catching the closing of Langley Fox Hemingway’s (yes, she’s that Hemingway‘s great-grand daughter) was an exercise in further acceptance of the painting-as-shellac thesis.
This thesis posits that the current moment in painting will be remembered largely as a time where the image (or portions of it, such as skin and metallic surfaces) are made as shiny, plastic, and slick as the artist is able. Hemingway has now firmly signed on as an acolyte of this approach.
Several paintings in the show depict an observer’s view into a space seen through a painted-on transparent sheet of plastic, glass or smoke acting as a distorting lens. These views, often comprised of empty motel or hotel rooms or cars are very much painted as if from life, placing the viewer as a co-voyeur, peering into the space. We are invited to experience the dated, dilapidated, and temporary. These are the views of a traveling salesman—complete with wood-panel covered walls and lonely beds.
These are not contemporary views. I haven’t seen a quilt on a motel bed during my lifetime. These images have history. Fox-Hemingway’s? Maybe. Her great-grandfather’s? That would be more plausible.
We see a 1970s wood-surrounded tube television painted in a hyper-realistic style whose painted. curved glass screen “reflects” an image back to the viewer of an empty room with a single twin bed covered with a quilt set into a metal frame. We see a wardrobe, open, white clothes hanging while two shaded table-lamps glow. Although the screen of the television points directly towards the viewer, there is no reflection of the painter captured. They’ve been removed.
Another painting, most likely from the same motel/hotel room offers us a view from atop the quilted bed cover facing the open wardrobe placed along a wood-paneled wall. We’re offered painted details of the metal bed frame (again) and a dresser with drawers and mirror which (again) reflects the room. Our view also offers us an open-doorwayed bathroom where a white shower curtain and towel hang. All of it is seen through a cigarette smoke wafting from an ashtray at the foot of the bed. Edward Hopper is a clear touchstone, but the lonely figures have been replaced with an even lonelier edge of ragged desperation.
Fox-Hemingway talks about making lonely places beautiful and romantic. The imagery is so ferociously loaded with symbols of vanished nothingness that it probably works as intended if you don’t look too closely at the smooth, rote technique with which its all rendered—or at least conveyed—but the lack of true investigation here makes these pictures too slick by half. If only she’d been a photographer.
Image: Staff