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Anthony Goicolea at Rare - New York - Brief Article
Art in America, Dec, 2001 by P.C. Smith
The photographic narratives Anthony Goicolea creates are highly realistic yet obviously staged. As in his 1999 debut, all the figures in his new works are versions of Goicolea himself. Using wigs, makeup and Photoshop, he convincingly transforms himself into varied, yet seemingly cloned, young boys. The pre- to barely pubescent boys are engaged in protosexual or aggressive actions that seem humorous, outrageous or fantasized.
Goicolea's earlier works (which were also reproduced in this exhibition's catalogue) quickly attracted attention because of a flirtation with homoerotic pedophilia. Yet that work never seemed pornographic; in Premature, underwearclad boys in a classroom seem to be ejaculating into mason jars. However, sexual experimentation is only one aspect of these often nostalgic but sometimes alarmingly awkward narcissistic emotional explorations.
Impressed by the rich social implications of Goicolea's work, one critic called him a conceptualist, while another included him in a discussion of "post-Cindy Sherman performance photography." Goicolea himself cites Charles Ray's neo-Pop influence. But Goicolea's mastery of seamless context is noteworthy. Photoshop assemblage of multiple views could produce a constructivist facture, but these painstaking works look like updated equivalents of 19th-century history paintings, with their flawless, large-scale realism directed toward a now-fashionable neutral, mainstream ease of reading.
His recent show, "Detention," contained seven large digital C-prints (including a triptych measuring 30 by 269 inches) that depict darker scenarios of ambiguous power relations among gangs of blond boys in private-school uniforms, sometimes theatrically frozen (sometimes almost literally frozen) in the snow in nocturnal, floodlit woods. Pile hilariously flings them into a school-yard heap. Yet the most powerful thrust of Goicolea's new work is away from the surreal toward a more tender visuality. Far from conceptualist, Window Washers recalls Uta Barth with ravishing subtleties of light and atmosphere licking through a fogged window. Blizzard constructs its playground-prisonyard imagery in deeper, less stagy perspective, and Floaters plays with underwater optical warpage. His boys are always emphatically cute, but their appeal is played against nasty transgressions. In Cannibals, while some boys rip into a dead classmate's flesh, others look ridiculously, charmingly repentant. Goicolea's self-portraiture complicates any notion of voyeurism. His manipulative technique has achieved a heartbreaking range of imaginative freedoms.
COPYRIGHT 2001 Brant Publications, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2001 Gale Group
