For his first show at Mendes Wood DM in New York, Matthew Lutz-Kinoy fills the gallery with canvases that line the walls and ceiling like the boiseries (painted wooden wall panels) that adorn the Boucher and Fragonard cabinets several blocks away at the Frick. These rooms have served as inspiration for the artist before: the performative figures in his large-scale canvases seem, like Boucher’s infants and Fragonard’s lovers, to inhabit landscapes of diaphanous and luminous colors that spill forth from centers with no horizons, where they act out playful narratives of suggestive content. At Mendes Wood DM, these landscapes are infiltrated by wild beasts that appear to have wandered into the painted panels as if they were invading garden plots and trampling them into threatening forests (think boiseries: the woods behind the wooden wainscoting).
Drawing the animals from the nineteenth-century exotic and from imperialist fantasies of artists like Horace Vernet...or Delacroix, Lutz-Kinoy couples them here with limpid human figures whose distinct lack of individual expression finds a projective foil in the externalized expression of their mammal partners. A bather of ambiguous gender clutches at a white cloth while a tiger ferociously slurps the water from which they emerge. Their bodies intertwine, the tiger’s tail mimicking the form of the bather’s peshtemal - or vice-versa - yet there appears to be no active emotional connection between the two. A distance separates the human from the animal, such that the expressive jolt of the animal content becomes diffused and revealed as a screen of emotional projection.
Entrada actualizada el el 13 may de 2019
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