Rachel Feinstein at Marianne Boesky

In contemporary art, references to Baroque and, even more so, Rococo painting and sculpture tend to serve as shorthand for decadence. Like Jeff Koons, Matthew Barney and Bonnie Collura, New York artist Rachel Feinstein draws on such sources with a wink and a smile, suggesting both genuine admiration and campy mockery of styles once thought beyond rehabilitation. Fragonard and Watteau created frothy paeans to the pleasures of surface, frivolity and irresponsibility. Feinstein's reworking of the Rococo yields slightly rancid confections that allude to pleasure rather than produce it.

In this show, a series of works reminiscent of Michelangelo Pistoletto's mirror paintings of the 1960s lined the wall. Painted onto sections of these oval looking-glasses are roughly brushed portraits of plump, decaying matrons overdressed in the ribbons, pearls and sausage curls of 18th-century European aristocracy. They look at us coquettishly, which makes their slavery to fashion all the more pathetic. The unpainted swaths of mirror around them reflect back the viewer's own face, taunting us with an unwanted identification with these absurd creatures.

The Rococo mutates further in Mister H L, a sculpture of polyurethaned foam painted white to suggest plaster or marble and set in an open niche that allows a view of its back side. It has the organic swells and curlicues of Rococo sculpture but it never quite coalesces into the figure it aspires to be. In place of a face, there is an undulating mass beneath what might be read as plumes of an elaborate hat. A pair of forms extending from the side might be arms, while on the reverse side of the sculpture the only fully defined element is a pair of rounded bare buttocks emerging from an amorphous spread of white. The whole work is like a cloud image that has just begun to disintegrate.

By contrast, two large stained-wood sculptures in the center of the front gallery were inspired in part by the late medieval sculptors Veit Stoss and Tilman Riemenschneider. They also have a lot to do with Cubism--the figures are sliced into segments as if by an egg cutter and pushed around at odd angles. Despite their three-dimensionality, the works really seem to reference painting more than sculpture, especially since their backs are distinctly less complex than their fronts. The show was rounded out with a painted-wood sculpture that presented three figures under a tree. Like the stained-wood sculptures, it is pieced together from flat segments, but figures and forms are defined largely by the application of brightly colored enamel paint rather than by three-dimensional properties. The result is less complex than the stained-wood sculptures and less satisfying.

Feinstein deforms styles that are already deformed. In the process, she flirts with the grotesque without really delving into its more unsettling implications. Ultimately, her works exude a blank irony that ruffles the surface without really disturbing the psyche.

COPYRIGHT 2005 Brant Publications, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2005 Gale Group