September 11-17, 2003

art

Materials Girl

Rachel Bliss, Poor Mr. Johnnie Rabeck (2003), 24 3/4 inches by 20 3/4 inches, oil and acrylic on panel.

Rachel Bliss’ rough-and-tough paintings explore the “ugly beauty” of man and animal.

by Robin Rice

When we think about the most ancient paintings, we recognize a dynamic interaction with surface. There have always been some artists like those early ones who remind us that seeing the qualities of a material -- soft, hard, dense, porous, smooth or bumpy -- is one of the pleasures of looking. We delight in the reality of texture: translucent veils of pigment, crumbs of graphite and charcoal and the evidence of physical motion. Paintings by Rachel Bliss, currently at Snyderman Gallery, document drawing, rubbing, layering, scraping, engraving and gouging on panels or linoleum tiles (one of her favorite supports). Thereís no pristine, invisible erasure here. Velvety and fluid or bitingly angular, the additive mark and the subtractive scratch are expressive statements of equal value.

This frank engagement with the making of a painting can be understood as a metaphor for the living of life. Cy Twombly may do it quite abstractly, giving us nothing to consider beyond the not inconsiderable symbolic power of mark making. Bliss has it both ways: representing illusionistically and through the abstraction of marking.

In life, as in art, contours laid down with insouciant perfection are unfortunately balanced against hopeful missteps and false starts. Imperfection lingers in memory, like the ears in Malcolm, a painting in which a sketchy, bandy-legged bird body supports the well-defined head of a man wearing a pointed clown cap. Shadowy pentimenti record gestures, which have been transformed and reiterated, suppressed in importance but not forgotten, not neglected. Bliss presents scars as emblems of life lived, not regretted.

She titled her show "Ugly Beauty." A related French idiom, une belle laide (a beautiful ugly one), refers to a woman who is not attractive in the conventional sense but whose charm transcends the easy gratification of perfect regularity. Among famous people, the best example I can think of is the actress Giulietta Masina, star of 1986's Ginger and Fred, among others, and the wife of director Federico Fellini. Masina was short. Her figure was nothing special, her face squarish, her lips thin. But her eyes were wonderfully sweet and expressive. James Barrie wrote of charm, "If you have it, you don't need to have anything else; and if you don't have it, it doesn't matter much what else you have."

In 1954's La Strada, Masina plays a simple-minded girl who is sold to a brutish, abusive Anthony Quinn. Many of the faces Bliss paints -- and most of her paintings are portraits of a sort -- breathe a similar poignancy. Blatantly frontal, with links to early Renaissance portraiture, these eyes meet ours with composure and an unselfconscious pathos. The eyes, nose and mouth are the main points of interest. Everything else shrinks away, not as in caricature but as if seen through a fisheye lens. Bodies mutate into animals or birds, often sketchy and asymmetrically articulated. In Doralis' Picnic, a limpid, dark-skinned, long-haired beauty has the body of a four-legged animal divided into faintly numbered sections, suggesting butcher's diagrams of cuts of beef. It could be a comment on the consumer approach to the bodies of beautiful women, but that interpretation is not forced. Doralis transcends her prime-cut anatomy.

Bliss labors over individual features, bringing out a solid three-dimensionality. They carry the emotional burden of humanism, while animal bodies, less carefully rendered, suggest the "animal" side of life: physical fragility and the lack of control an animal has over its destiny.

There are over a hundred portraits in the show and a number of non-portrait animals, too. Ninety-seven heads are part of a scattered installation of 3-inch square painted tiles attached to the wall with Velcro. Bliss, who says she likes the sound of Velcro ripping, described them as "like little hors d'oeuvres. Someone could rearrange them: put all the angry guys together or all the Asian guys. I know my kids are going to be doing it. We like to put them on the floor and make up stories about them."

Every painting in the show invites narratives, but the most clearly narrative work, like Poor Mr. Johnnie Rabeck, is larger. Based on the creepy children's song, Rabeck is an animal/human with pointy unmatching ears like a pit-bull, whose docked ears have been damaged in a fight. He's not vicious now but pitiful. Sausages dance above the table where he has been bloodily decapitated. Corduroy, a cartoon-like bear, bares two rows of blocky white choppers in a hungry snarl -- not your usual teddy.

Many subjects, like Malcolm, wear the peaked clown cap. One is titled Fighter (Self-Portrait). Like Jean-Antoine Watteau, another artist who reflected on the fragility and melancholy of life and art, Bliss portrays herself as an entertainer, one who successfully amuses but who is not always amused.

RACHEL BLISS: UGLY BEAUTY

Through Sept. 27 Snyderman Gallery, 303 Cherry St., 215-238-9576

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