Todd Bienvenu Opens at Trestle Gallery Tomorrow Night

Todd Bienvenu, Pure Class, 2014, oil on canvas, 52.5 x 46.5 inches
Image courtesy of Life on Mars Gallery

Todd Bienvenu is in Long Story Short at Trestle Gallery with Nicholas Borelli, Katherine Bradford, Hilary Doyle, Kenny Rivero, and Halley Zien.

April 2 – May 8, 2015
Opening tomorrow April 2, 7-9PM.

Trestle Gallery, 168 7th Street, Brooklyn, NY 11215

Kang Hoodoo

A Note on Zulu Painting.

As it happens I have an appreciable Zulu painting by Todd Bienvenu now hanging in the stairwell of a Park Slope double-wide. It is a brown and creamy splotch of a thing, with lots of subtle greens and blues, and it goes with the colors of the brownstone. It looks as if a house painter used the canvas for cleaning brushes, and left some of his own thoughts as well. A wonderful wipeout of a painting, full of deft brushwork and slights of hand.

Todd Bienvenu, Stooges, 2013

Stooges, by Todd Bienvenu, deserves a great foyer in a Brooklyn mansion somewhere. It's fitting for reception areas, a mischievous "whatever" with a humorous tone. Cool and welcoming, and tasteful. Brownish and creamy shit-colors and throwaway chicken guts comport beautifully with the patina of any distressed hardwood interior in the borough. It is a painting that lends itself to furniture, as furnishing, for the location, for the occasion. A polite, decorative painting, and also snapped like a table cloth from under a banquet. Exceedingly well juggled, and all wrapped up in a mud-ball of brownish baroque. Just a big beautiful rumpus of a painting that doesn't care what you think.

It was serendipity that just as I finished installing this painting in the Greco-Victorian hallway of the building, there appeared Basquiat and the Bayou at some "Confederate Museum" in New Orleans.

In that moment it hit me like a coconut on the head ... that there really is such a thing as zombie painting, or voodoo, or Zulu painting, whatever you want to call it. It is a subculture in painting that excels at what an art critic might euphemistically call "canceling maneuvers" or "abject expressions of defiance or refusal" or simply "insouciance."

Jean-Michel Basquiat, King Zulu, 1986

Robert St. Brice (20th cent. Haitian) signed, oil on board, Voodoo face, 29" x 25"
Robert St. Brice was one of the very few first generation Haitian painters
who was totally unique. His brand of voodoo expressionism straight from his psyche
is totally unique and powerful. So much so he was the inspiration or father
of the Saint Soleil genre that is in such demand today,
but still no one painted like St. Brice. From this website.

Stooges, Installation View

Todd Bienvenu's work is by no means limited to the zombie theme, he's not some goth obsessive. He is better known for his lurid scenes of American life, wrestling, girls, beer culture, and so on. We just happen to have a few gems at the gallery from his earlier and more abstract zombie phase. "Stooges" is looking for placement in a top-notch residence anywhere in the city. "Spitfire" is a high note in Bienvenu's zombie period. In one bullseye after another his work covers an ample range of human experiences and foibles.

Todd Bienvenu, Spitfire, 2013

Todd Bienvenu, Spitfire, 2013, Detail

Two years of Todd Bienvenu in Bushwick is already a national treasure, a pristine document in style and place of a reviled and envied hepitude. Bienvenu's world is usually presented as an allegory, where the "great white trash" of America stands in for a pastural meditation, like an old dixie rococo painting, upon what is really a complex urban life. Since my gallery has a history with this painter, I can only say we are soon to be safely in the dust of his career, I'm sure. This painting, Stooges, is that dust perhaps. It is a premier brownstone hallway painting, a glorious splotch, stylishly replete with astringent maneuvers in abstraction and figuration. The painting is all cancellations and cross-outs, a lateral dive across language ... with zombies. And it coheres, it hangs together in its localized drama, and in its very human stain as painting.

Stooges, Installation View

Donald Baechler, Untitled ("globe"), 1984

A brutal moment leaves a skid mark on the document of painting. Donald Baechler and Rick Prol may not have been zombie painters, or they may have been at one time or another, I don't know. They might as well have been, I don't care. By zombie painting I do not just mean some special instance of outsider folk art. Rather, I mean the insult carried from outsider folk art into the avant-garde, as a deliberate strategy. This dodge does not come only under the sign of the zombie. Though it comes often enough under that motif, it is really one of several related strategies that pertain to art as resistance.

Several painters in the East Village in the 1980s detected a fault line between the "visual culture" of the postmodernists, and the "visuality" that was preferred by the old school painters. They tore up that fault line. They decided to insult painters and conceptualists in one go. Hoodoo painting is one example of this trend from the strange afternoon of the East Village scene. Strong icons are needed to rattle the cage of painting, and there is nothing in the universe of aesthetic experience quite like the rooster-strut of a Haitian or a Bayou zombie. It is a treasured vernacular of the American continent.

Rick Prol, I Have This Cat, 1985, acrylic on canvas, wood, and glass, 96 x 93 in.

"If painting is dead, well then, here's a painting of a zombie."

— Todd Bienvenu, 2013

This, by the way, is zombie criticism. It has no real existence. I represent Todd Bienvenu, I sell his work. And so of course I like it. Obviously I am a big fan. You may call this is an advertisement. All the same, important announcements about the artist are in order. Someone must note that Todd Bienvenu is teaching in Louisiana right now, just as the Basquiat "bayou paintings" go on exhibit there. 

John d'Addario in his piece in Hyperallergic informs us that the Mississippi had a powerful imaginative influence on Basquiat, a Brooklynite of Haitian and Puerto Rican parentage whose actual experience of the US South was limited. Todd Bienvenu comes from Louisiana with Cajun roots. And these two American painters bare comparison, I submit, and have said in the past, in that each is a trenchantly original painter of zombies.

Zombie aesthetics are folk art entangled in the ganglion of fine art. The zombie is the atavistic feature of a discourse; the twitching of the insensate. It is the chicken man in Blue Velvet. It serves to rend the wall of intelligibility. What Basquiat and Bienvenu, and Prol and Baechler do is to acknowledge unintelligibility in art. The painting is the document of a mistake, and the artist is ready to abandon art as the critics do. That is, in haste, with Adorno, and just as readily. And I like a painting that has no scruples about such things.

— Ethan Pettit, 31 October 2014

Todd Bienvenu, Zombie Apocalypse, 2013

Inventory and Prices for Todd Bienvenu
Artist's profile on this site
artist's website
The Gatorman Cometh – portrait of the artist as a young zombie, May 2013
more on Bienvenu in our gallery notebook 2014

Deportraiture – Barbara Friedman

Recent paintings and drawings

April 20 - June 29, 2014

Barbara Friedman's profile on this site

Big Collar 1 oil on linen 60 x 48 in. 2014

Big Collar 2 oil on linen 60 x 48 in. 2014

Big Collar 3 oil on linen 60 x 48 in. 2014

catalog (pdf download 4.2 MB)

Portrait of Gertrude van Limborch
(after Thomas de Keyser) oil on wood 24 x 18 in. 2014

Over the past two years I’ve parked my easel at the Brooklyn Museum, often in front of Thomas de Keyser’s portrait of Gertrude van Limborch (1632). When I am there I paint my own versions of the portrait, letting my rendition verge on disappearing, or else allowing some features to spring into focus, in a way that threatens to make the source unrecognizable.

These “versions” of the de Keyser contain a trace of Gertrude van Limborch’s face. She is the touchstone for any variations I produce, as the subjects are in other portraits from that era. My purpose in working from these old paintings is to serve both their makers and their subjects: not just to bring de Keyser back into view but van Limborch too, and every other person now long dead who was lively and aware when the painters portrayed them.

Another presence is my mother, who used many aliases during her eventful life. It was only after her death that I discovered that as a child she went by the name Gertrude. She invented so much about her life that her adult existence became a distorted portrait she had painted of herself, barely showing the girl Gertrude she had started out as.

One prominent feature of many of these paintings is the Dutch ruff collar. This was a big starched and pleated collar, a style that lasted from about 1550 to 1650. A “pinwheel” around the neck, the ruff was also used on sleeve cuffs. The discovery of starch allowed ruffs to be formed in elaborate figure-eights. The ruff held one’s head up in a haughty pose, aristocratically, with obvious appeal for wealthy Europeans of the time. Queen Elizabeth I wore a ruff, but she issued decrees that limited the size and even the colors of ruffs that could be worn by commoners outside the royal court. In some of the newest paintings from this series the collar is extremely exaggerated.

Although these paintings still riff off my museum studies, they play more aggressively with scale and color, and bring the ornate ruff collar into the territory of gender, class, and body issues.

— Barbara Friedman, April 2014

Portrait of Gertrude van Limborch
Thomas de Keyser
(Dutch 1596/97–1667) at the Brooklyn Museum

Cropped Gertrude
oil on linen 48 x 16 in 2014

The “portrait” has been Barbara Friedman’s idiom of choice in recent years, and yet portraiture is only one dimension of what the critic Lilly Wei calls, without exaggeration, a “formally inventive” approach to painting. These are instinctive and erudite paintings, and they summon a formidable range of strategies. Friedman sets up her easel in museums and pretends to copy the old masters, a trope she associates with “lady” painters. Then comes a subtle but unrelenting process of distortion, destruction, and recovery.

Friedman is a professor at Pace University, a resident of lower Manhattan, and a veteran of the East Village scene. I met Barbara a few years ago when she visited our showroom in Bushwick. Soon after that she became represented at our gallery, and since then she has also showed at Valentine, Studio 10, and Storefront Ten Eyck. Her unearthly portraits have cast a prolonged gaze into this inscrutable demimonde. They are tuned to the habits and the jitters of people who prowl the galleries of Brooklyn and downtown at the present time. And this quality sets them off, distinguishes them as a keen synthesis of painterly and temporal issues.

We are thrilled to be opening Deportraiture on April 19th, a large show of Friedman’s recent work. This show will occupy the front and back rooms of our gallery, it is a thorough display of the work of a painter who has already made a strong showing in Brooklyn. We are honored and proud to host this show, and I hope you will join us for the opening.

— Ethan Pettit, April 2014

Portrait of Gertrude van Limborch
(after Thomas de Keyser) oil on wood 24 x 18 in. 2014

Portrait of a Dutch Woman oil on linen 48 x 46 in. 2014

A Ruff Meditation

Ethan Pettit

The salient of that febrile mind that tossed and turned between the afflatus of Shakespeare and the appearance of Isaac Newton, was the ruff collar. By some accounts an article of fashion not to be outdone until the 1970s, it was a sartorial pinwheel that couched the head and doubtless gyrated to Kepler’s laws of planetary motion.

At the dawn of empire it sprang from the throat. “Sooner may one guess who shall bear away The Infanta of London, heir to an India,” wrote Donne, than one may guess, “What fashioned hats, or ruffs, or suits next year our subtle-witted antic youths will wear.”

They wore the ruff for about another twenty or thirty years, until the middle of the 1600s. It was an Elizabethan accessory that survived the Thirty Years War, the Eighty Years War, the Civil War, for it was laden with starch. The ruff went out of fashion as the scientific awakening began, but long before the time of the Bach family and the awakening in arts and letters that is still with us, or should be.

In the Meditations Descartes says not simply that he thinks therefore he is. Had he said only that he would have vanished. He says more poignantly that he exists because he can be deceived. If all that he knows and feels is suspect, then he is deceived. But for something to be deceived there must be something to deceive, hence something exists. Here is the astringent reduction, the first picture of the “thing that thinks” which Spinoza would rehearse as well somewhat later.

Most careful attention must have been paid to the head when it had lost trust in its body and the world around it and knew not yet what laws governed bodies in the world. Hence the accordion that unfolds from the neck and buffers the brain in a provisional sphere.

And even among the protestant divines of New England, with their immensely complex interior lives, you find that radiant countenance framed in the ruff. Though here the broad flat collar largely replaced the ruff, still it is on the first governor of Massachusetts. On John Smith of Virginia it is, shockingly, as bizarre as the headdress of Powhatan.

It was in the other Dutch colony, the one north of Flushing Avenue, that Barbara Friedman’s unearthly portraits drew attention to the reflexes of the picture-viewing public. It was an unnerving appearance. And in this new range of portraits her distortions are joined to a beguiling anachronism, a separation of the head by a device from the far side of the modern repertoire, and which sweeps away with not a little pomp all of the tropes that are supposed to populate a canvas.

Portrait of Gertrude van Limborch
Thomas de Keyser
(Dutch 1596/97 - 1667) oil on canvas, 1632

Gertrude with Green Collar on Red
oil on linen36 x 27 in. 2014

Big Portrait of a Dutch Man (after Jacob Backer)
oil on linen 48 x 46 in. 2014

Big Collar with Child oil on linen 27 x 36 in. 2014

Big Collar 4 oil on linen 60 x 48 in. 2014

Interleaf Drawings charcoal on glassine on paper 2013

Gertrude’s Collar Over an Alpine Village
oil on linen 2012-14

Gertrude’s Forehead oil on wood 24 x 18 in. 2014

Todd Bienvenu at Life on Mars on Friday

Constellations, 2013, at Life on Mars

The specter of false consciousness still haunts the art world. New art stars are still received either with mawkish tones of hope or with a Bronx cheer. For thirty years we have been snared in this ambivalent jag. Criticism takes refuge in elaborate workarounds and risorgimenti. Brooklyn takes truckloads of guff for truckloads of hubris. And very few painters have been able to crack this mess open and splay it out as deliciously as Todd Bienvenu.

The Gatorman Cometh

Or, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Zombie
– the paintings of Todd Bienvenu

Stooges oil on canvas 2013

There is a place in the soul where the profane damns the sacred and swamps it in whisky and crocodile tears. We know the place, it is a rage that spits venom and sorrow in equal doses. It has on the one hand the rudest manners and on the other the tenderest heart. It is that part of us that curses out the world in the worst language, if only to express our yearning for a beauty and kindness that we
miss in the world.

It is not a pretty sight. In the canvases of a painter from Louisiana living and working in the thrall of Bushwick abstractionism, the scene might look like an upturned graveyard in the bayou after a flood. If painting is dead, says Todd Bienvenu, well then, here’s a painting of a zombie.

Zombie oil on small canvas 2013

Spitfire oil on canvas 2013

Spitfire detail

Royal Rumble oil on large canvas 2013

Bienvenu studied at the New York Studio School, he is a protege of Bill Jensen, and for all his low-brow antics, Bienvenu gets that you have to wrap it up, you have to get it right. He gets that you have to give people something to write about. You have to talk to the conversation. His brush slithers and slimes around like a Mississippi mud snake, but his canvas hangs together splendidly. He is an excavator like de Kooning, and he shares that voodoo thing with Basquiat out of the belly of the
American continent.

Trouble oil on canvas 2013

Barf-O-Rama oil on canvas 2013

Wrestling, bordellos, floozies, whisky lanes, death metal concerts in the hinterlands of unemployed America. Chicks so hot they’re ugly. It’s all there. And he simply has an enviable dexterity with paint. He’s the kind of artist who inspires the back-seat driver in the critic. You want to urge him to go this way or that, to see what will happen. At a studio visit I hear myself sounding like Clement Greenberg, “More flat, less depth!” And so on.

James Ensor and Rick Prol also come to mind. Todd Bienvenu regurgitates art historical references, more so than is readily apparent, since these are well digested, not swallowed whole. They are elegant canvases, once you get past the drawl. And some are complex. We get some Cy Twombly and some phases of informal European abstraction, respiratory painting, event painting.

Todd Bienvenu is an exemplary Bushwick painter. He processes a lot, sorts out a lot, I think, for the scene, all the while keeping a casual under-the-radar attitude. Yet he performs quite well the ambitious painter’s job of hitting bases and killing tropes, and this in a crazy young art scene in difficult times. And he does it without ever being rigid, and never at the expense of the sacred and the profane.

Ethan Pettit, 28 May 2013

Inventory and Prices for Todd Bienvenu
Artist's profile on this site
artist's website
Kang Hoodoo, Bienvenu and Basquait, October 2014
more on Bienvenu in our gallery notebook 2014

Ideogram and Morphism - Robert Egert

Inversion blue chalk, blue conté on printmaking paper, 11 x 17 in. 2012

The underworld, a world unknown by any living person, is imagined as an extension of our own world but perversely altered. It exists in a parallel universe–a magical place that obeys the laws of conventional, three dimensional space but yet cannot be accessed save by passing through the transformation of death. Like a mirror to our own world, the underworld is often depicted as an inverted reflection of our living reality. An inverted torch, a window that slides open from the top, a bed that clings to the ceiling. - R.E.

Robert Egert’s biomorphic, blue chalk drawings took me by surprise – full of magma energy, wit, and speculations on the body, on science, on nature mimicking art. His images are Darwin’s dreams, Philip Guston’s party-jokes, or Frida Kahlo’s sighs of grief. They hold underworlds of swirly vessels, Klein bottles (non-orientable, mathematical surfaces), slaughterhouse slurry turned into bone meal, and pumping diastolic hearts. While classically beautiful, they shocked me to subservience – I was suddenly alone, at 30,000 feet, where I could hear a pin drop.

— William Allen, WG Magazine, September 2012

Robert Egert grew up riding his bicycle through Bushwick in the 1970s. Twenty years later he was living in Williamsburg and was one of the handful of artists who founded the artists’ community there. Williamsburg’s early bohemians share an intense bond. They are like family to me. And even if I might not know them well, as friends in the ordinary sense, I know them deeply in connection with our shared philosophical roots.

Lekythoi No.6 tempera on archival paper 23 x 30 in. 2012

Williamsburg in the 90s was an oasis of weirdness at a time when art on the whole was very derivative. There was a movement here that advanced synthesis over analysis in art making. The neighborhood became known for hybrid forms and unearthly environments. There was a generative, organic quality to the art that was starkly different from the imagistic literalism of postmodernism. You can see this overall trend in Williamsburg in the work of Roxy Paine, Chris Martin, Amy Sillman, Ken Butler, Rachel Harrison, Ebon Fisher, to name a few. And you can also see in the history of this art scene a fusion between conceptualism and abstract painting.

To be sure, art writers invariably strain to find overarching narratives, and I would not attempt to do this, for example, with the new trends in painting in Bushwick, which in most cases I think are no more connected with old Williamsburg than they are with any number of other historical trends in painting. Still, we can point to some things that happened to New York Art at the turn of the century as the scene began to migrate across the East River. The appearance of certain esoteric and organic motifs in abstract painting in Greenpoint in the 1980s (James Harrison, Peter Acheson, Chris Martin). And the way in which certain conceits of minimalism merged with media art in the “warehouse movement” along the waterfront in the early 90s.

Robert Egert’s work provides a key to this transition. His work spans the whole of it. Some of his paintings even look like keys, or compact hybrids of organic life and language poised for an unraveling.

Torasik conté on printmaking paper, approx. 12 x 23 in. 2010-2011

A Klein Bottle is a mathematical construction that takes the form of a three-dimensional object. The Klein Bottle has a single continuous surface that coterminously includes both interior and exterior surfaces. Apposite to the basic nature of evolutionary biology, the Klein Bottle is in fact a primitive model for capture, consumption and digestion. - R.E.

Robert Egert oil on canvas, late 80s

Robert began his career in the postmodern East Village and Soho in the 80s. Then he was in the middle of the Brooklyn phenomenon in the 90s. He took a master’s degree in Marxist studies at the storied CUNY grad center under Marshall Berman, a right of passage of many thinkers and readers in the neighborhood at that time. And so even though there is a Brooklyn synthetic quality to his organic forms, there is also an analytic quality that comes through from the 80s fascination with history, power, the construction of knowledge (epistemology), and so forth.

Organ 1 conté on printmaking paper, 12 x 17 in. 2009

The delicate red and blue conté drawings remind me of those mysterious illustrations in the very first encyclopedias, like the drawings assembled by the brigade of draftsmen who accompanied Napoleon’s army to Egypt. Specimens from a naïve science.

Robert Egert oil on cavas, late 80s

Pendulum conté on printmaking paper, 11 x 17 in. 2012

The word pendulum can refer to the swinging part of a clock that acts to maintain and regulate movement. But the origin of the word comes from the latin, pendulus, hanging down. Our own gross (large) organs are concentrated in our chest, thorax, neck and head, and our appendages are largely composed of skeletal, muscular, adipose tissue, nerve, skin, etc. In the future, scientists will likely explore the implantation of sensory organs in our appendages to enhance our sensorial capacity. This will be especially useful in military applications. - R.E.

The conté drawings could also be rubbings from some alien fossil, or powdery carbon copies drawn out of some forgotten photomechanical process. One inspiration that Robert mentions are medical illustrations of vascular systems, where long arteries are truncated for easier viewing.

Somewhere between language and life form, Egert draws these entities as discrete symbols, carefully conjoined with their negative spaces. And then there are intricate details inside the shapes, rendering a deeper layer of anatomy. The drawings are done on a rough and allegedly extinct kind of laid printing paper. The pigment dust lies on the page a delicate powder, much like Odilon Redon’s use of charcoal.

They are pithy but not cynical. Actually they are affirmative and sincere. They hold out an ephemeral optimism against a disembodied modernity that they nonetheless acknowledge. Simply, the possibility of new aesthetic life against considerable odds. They remind me of the marks that a philosopher might make who has forsaken writing, but whose pictograms still contain the powder of the battlefield.

— Ethan Pettit, 25 September 2012

Robert Egert's profile on this website