PICTURE THIS: 
NEW REPRESENTATIONAL PAINTING

Godfried Donkor
Brendan Dooley
Fernando Molero
Victor Rodriguez

Curated by Christian Viveros-Fauné

December 9 - January 8, 2000
Artist's reception: Thursday, December 9, 6 - 8 p.m.

What ought to be the subject of painting today ? What form or forms should it take ? These are the questions several younger generations of painters are now asking themselves. After nearly a decade-long drought, painting has begun recuperating some of its old ground from other practices like installation and photography. Thanks to a new brand of stylistic pluralism and an increasing openness to diverse sources, painting at the end of the century has once again returned to grapple with signal matters in contemporary society.

Representational painters have been especially willing during the last few years to take on multiple sources and materials. Walking a jagged, exploratory line between Modernism's august authority and the one-liner of postmodernist pastiche, artists from all over the world have recently made painting's long tradition a speedy vehicle for exploration rather than plodding carrier of canonical meaning.

Picture This, an exhibition of new painting, features the work of four international artists- Godfried Donkor, Brendan Dooley, Fernando Molero and Victor Rodriguez - working in varied representational styles. Spanning the continents, Africa, Europe, Latin and North America, these four artists engage representation from diverse, equally committed angles. Picking up conceptual strategies here, neocolonial discourse there, the strategies of painterly touch or illusionism elsewhere, Donkor, Dooley, Molero and Rodriguez make of their highly individual work increasingly renegade and nomadic projects, while shuttling the attendant ideologies that would have once rendered their work unnecessarily programmatic.

Donald Judd once said "Painting is like musical theater," by which he meant that painting is made up of a set of conventions. The artists in Picture This take greater and greater liberty in individually researching and expanding those conventions. Whether it's by reshuffling historical images of black men in the case of Godfried Donkor's Slave to Champ series; investigating the near edges of abstraction and commodity fetish in the case of Brendan Dooley's images of car headlights; getting down interior landscapes in Fernando Molero's contained but violent visions of Brooklyn; or, in the case of Victor Rodriguez, recycling Hyper-Realist painting for determinedly conceptual and graphic ends; these artists are part and parcel of a real and novel pluralism during the late 90's in the field of painting. Through their highly individual work, Donkor, Dooley, Molero and Rodriguez help steer representational painting not towards a single unifying point but to a genuine growth of possibilities.

Gallery contact: Emilio Steinberger
Email: aaa@agrp.com  
     

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