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William LePore at Butters
Art in America, April, 2007 by Sue Taylor
William LePore called this exhibition of multi-panel paintings (all 2006) "Movement in the Desert," referring to the war in Iraq. Though quasi-abstract, the paintings' wealth of trenchant detail suggests a clash of East and West. Here, crescent shapes and floral carpet motifs meet Disney characters and dollar bills. Each work's title might be read as a military tactic, for example Cluster Formation, Diversion, Frontal Assault. Encircle describes that particular offensive maneuver while playing off the painting's dominant circular shapes; these bring Johns's targets to mind, as well as telescopic lenses, gun sights, lifesavers and the like. Indeed, throughout this series, recurring circular forms focus attention and unify otherwise disparate panels while implying a kind of political entrapment--in dizzying rhetoric and a vicious cycle of escalating involvement.
Adding to the complexity of the paintings, LePore incorporates printed fabrics whose busy designs echo his antiwar themes: a startling pattern of little flowers with barbed-wire and skull-and-crossbones motifs, or Warholish dollar bills for the capitalist greed driving the occupation. In Night Watch, droplets of black paint stain a field of tiny white stars in a metaphor for oil-tainted patriotism. This spangled panel is juxtaposed with another depicting a diminutive derrick spewing fiery clouds of smoke. LePore's contempt for the Bush administration's prosecution of the war becomes even more obvious in Intersect, where a figure of Goofy dances on roller skates beneath a thought balloon full of money, ignoring the schematic explosions that surround him, each tagged with a number (perhaps of casualties). The banality of the cartoon image contrasts with the somber quality of its companion panel, on which the Arabic word for Allah is faintly but repeatedly inscribed on a black ground. In other works, Pinocchio--legendary puppet and compulsive liar--and Mickey Mouse appear, the latter blissfully unaware despite being pinned, or "boxed in" as the title asserts, beneath the bold black ground plan of a palace or mosque.
LePore's appropriation of popular-culture icons serves a satirical purpose but also reminds us of the thoroughly mediated nature of our sense of the war. His insistent superimposition of image and pattern; his inscription of linear motifs, Picabia-style, upon deftly painted passages; his use of screening devices such as grids or, in Communication Barrier, chicken wire--all this overlay suggests the thicket of news, propaganda, disconnect and deceit that informs and obscures our perception of the conflict. Ironically, conflict of a different sort arises in the viewer of these pictures, caught between shared moral outrage and the sheer visual pleasure LePore delivers.
COPYRIGHT 2007 Brant Publications, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2008 Gale, Cengage Learning
