Although it's been many years since the New
York artist Willy Lenski stopped making
films, many of the oil paintings in this
show seem intimately connected to film and
camera effects. There are double exposures
(in Double Exposure, two images of a girl
looking through a camera overlap, her
partially open mouth echoing the circle of
the lens); dissolves (in About, You Know,
the Past, the sexy torso of a young boy on
the left side dissolves into bare feet on
the right); sound strips (in Nervous Priest
a monk shares the pictorial space with a
collaged film strip, containing not images
but the graphic wave form of the chanted
syllable "om"); and production out-takes
(in Reverse Pre-Raphaelite, the female
model posing for the large painting Susanna
and the Elders sits on a chair and smokes a
cigarette during a break).
The film motifs are a clue. Lenski is after
something that takes place "between" the
naturalistic image (as on the movie screen)
and the viewer, an effect of subjective
consciousness that approaches the
metaphysical from a position rooted in what
he calls "that right-here quality
demonstrated in an object painted with an
immediate and tactile beauty." The craft of
the paintings is a recognition that the
compulsion to make pictures is another one
of the world's oldest professions.
With works varying in size from 14 x 16 in.
to 45 x 70 in., this show is rich and
sprawling. At first glance monochromatic,
the paintings are done in a grisaille of
raw umber, a pigment mixed with other muted
hues -- white and gold, rose and viridian
-- for an effect that the artist wryly
terms "psychedelic brown." They're painted
on smooth wood panel and unframed, and
combine carefully drawn and modeled figures
that seem to emerge from abstract
backgrounds of broad gestures and
accidental calligraphy.
I would have to say that Lenski is a
religious painter after the death of God.
The Nervous Priest, shown catching a smoke
-- is it tobacco or something more mind-
expanding? -- is taking a break from the
sacred. He's a character who's out of
character. "Real character is about
addiction," Lenski says, "you can see it in
the fingertips." In Pieta, a young man
(modeled by the artist's son -- is this
important?) takes the Virgin's pose, but
embraces only air -- or it could be a
ghost. In a smaller painting, a bare-
chested man dressed in running shorts and
sneakers stands in a sacred space,
apprehensively looking over his shoulder
lest someone see his sacred code -- he's at
a bank cash machine. Another large
painting, called Floorboards, shows a
workman sorting through a pile of planks
that extends up and out of the entire
visual field; it's an allegorical image
that begins from the title of Dostoyevsky's
Notes from the Underground, which literally
translates as "...from under the
floorboards."
My favorite work, Susanna and the Elders,
stages the parable with minimal detail,
placing the two malevolent male voyeurs off
to the side and Susanna in a flower-covered
bikini at the water's edge, standing by the
famous pair of trees that the prophet
Daniel uses to separate the truth from the
word, that is, to establish Susanna's
innocence in the face of the false
testimony of the elders. Over the gallery
desk is One Hand Clapping, a painting that
shows an erotic spanking (by a male hand of
a naked female behind), multiplied by four
with a good deal of compositional finesse.
It stays in the realm of the sensual,
bordering on the pornographic, but suggests
most strongly a previously unseen erotic
detail from Michelangelo's Sistine ceiling.
Lenski's work is philosophy on a rude
level, an answer to the iconoclasts who
insist that the image of god can't be made
of the same stuff as chamber pots. But
that's exactly the level at which paintings
work best, as small philosophical arguments
that lead the viewer back to real
philosophical events like birth and death.
As the Catholic saint John of Damascus put
it in the 8th century A.D., even the
unlettered peasant knows that the coin in
his pocket stamped with the image of the
emperor is not the emperor in his pocket.
But he knows that he's in the emperor's
realm.
O'Hara Gallery, 41 E. 57th St., NYC 10022
Feb. 26 - Mar. 22 1997
CATHY LEBOWITZ is a painter and works at
Art in America.
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