Yesterday I wandered into the Walter Robinson Show at Jeffery Deitch on Wooster Street. His paintings had been up for some time. I rarely attended openings. Too many people struggling to be noticed in a crowd of attention seekers. I have never made any money or gotten laid at an art opening. At least not that I can recall. Drunk on cheao white art wine. Hell yeah.
I had some familiarity of the artist's work. His sharp flourish with the brush envikvening the studied banality of his subject; cheeseburgers and TV beauties. Garish without vulgarity. I like the more erotic, but remembered Duncan Hannah's homages to Balthus. The risk of eroticism and sin. Younger not women but girls. Unsettling. Viewing his I felt like a criminal. Not even a naughty voyeur awoke at Deitch. So happy to have seen his work without anyone in the gallery.
Walter Robinson: Let the Music Play May 2–June 6, 2026 18 Wooster Street, New York We may be known for what we do in life, or even for what we do not do, but to measure those things we do, even when we know better not to, is how we truly understand ourselves. That understanding, almost an empathy in Walter Robinson’s (1950-2025) art, is a rare wisdom. Call them guilty pleasures, simple joys or cheap thrills, their superfluous folly is not so much a lapse of judgement but a suspension of it. Perhaps all the indulgences and excesses that constitute our pleasure-economy are bad for us, dulling our wits, slackening our resolve and polluting our body, but to willfully enter this field of numbing distraction, and to stay there vigilantly alert as if before a grander sublimity, is a kind of deviant medicine. Wickedly smart yet struck with a trickster’s lunacy, Robinson channels so much of what is besetting the human condition into a contemplative sensory reverie, harnessing all that clutters our mind into a radically subversive instrument to probe our desires.
To read more please go to https://deitch.com/new-york/exhibitions/walter-robinson-let-the-music-play
No comments:
Post a Comment