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Saturated Spaces
Jordan Massengale comes into his own with Inside Out
By Alfredo Triff
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Sorority is a postmodern version of baroque
stereotypes. |
Don’t
miss Jordan Massengale’s Inside Out, an exhibition of
paintings at Leonard Tachmes Gallery. What in the past I took as
Massengale’s lack of conviction (his good, yet unfocused
back-and-forth dabbling in different things at once) can be
justified after this show as the “endless wrestling of the
artist with his own demons,” as painter Gauguin once put it.
Massengale’s dark and inventive virtuosity is coming to
fruition. He is not trying to shock, be cool or play the market,
but to portray a symptom by delving into our systemic
post-capitalist decadence. This less gory and subtler Massengale
comes with caustic skill, love for detail and — at times — a
Crumbian misogynist wit.
No Balls
presents a vacant brick-layered interior with arches and
graffitied walls buttressed by steel rods (with a portion of a
roof missing to show the sky). Something is amiss — from the
empty pool tables on the colorful linoleum-covered floors to the
tower amp in a corner to the bird picking on pizza leftovers
inside a box over a plank on top of a green barrel, the painting
exudes an inimical tediousness.
How to convey anomie? Nothing to Watch shows a young
helmet-wearing person sitting on a leather sofa (giving us her
back), diagonally staring at a TV’s color bars, inside a
colorful room out of a low-budget, mid-1960s John Cassavetes
movie set. Although one’s attention gets lost in the details,
the painting is able to actually convey blankness.
In Bachelor Pad, we peek at downtown
Miami
through a window, inside a claustrophobic space where time has
become gooey. Notice how successfully Massengale tackles five
different surfaces next to each other — plywood cabinet finish,
wall stucco, glass table, faux-granite kitchen countertop and
ceramic bathroom floor — as well as the disparity between pine,
oak, plywood and cherry wood textures on the various surfaces on
the left-hand side of the painting.
Sorority
is a postmodern version of the stereotypical image of baroque
idealized rapture: We see a young girl, dressed in black,
performing a dazzling pirouette in midair, clutching a
mantelpiece with her right hand, which has sent an orange
orb-lamp flying. A white cat soars over a coffee table, next to
a purple birdcage with a monkey inside it holding a banana,
which only adds to the episode’s weirdness. The overstated
action contradicts the stillness of the room’s furniture and
wall décor — all innocent and cute. As usual, in the background,
we notice the heads and legs of two other female silhouettes. Is
this exploration inside a vanishing Caucasian female student
institution a symptom of what Jennifer DeVere Brody calls “shift
between banality and oblivion”?
Some of Massengale’s characters live inside a quirky world of
passive-aggressive exhibitionistic sexual alienation, as if
incapable or unwilling to free themselves from their
predicament. In Waiting Room, the weird and the mundane
implode: A woman, dressed in a 1940s black gown with a lace hat,
sits across from a dummy placed on a tall chaise. They are
inside a small waiting room packed with a bookshelf filled with
tomes, trophies, lamps, a rug, a writer’s desk and an antique
radio. While the dummy stares at the woman, a Lolita-like figure
makes out a sensual pose behind a see-through wooden latticed
division leading to the mezzanine. The whole scene plays like a
silent film, the self-contained action so strangely charged that
no words are needed.
Having said that, I think that at times there is just too much
going on inside these paintings. Massengale could control his
urge to saturate his spaces with stuff and listen more to what
artist Ad Reinhardt described as a painting’s “inner voice” (horror
vacui only points to insecurity). Allowing the work’s own
style to take its course is crucial at this point because this
art deserves it.
Jordan Massengale’s
Inside Out will be showing through March 12 at Leonard
Tachmes Gallery, 3930 N.W.
Second Ave.,
Miami.
Call 305-572-9015, or visit www.artnet.com/leonardtachmes.html. |
