
Bruce Gagnier at John Davis, installation view (all images courtesy John Davis Gallery)
HUDSON, N.Y. — Bruce Gagnier’s life-size figure sculptures have been popping up everywhere this past year: at Lori Bookstein Fine Art, the National Academy Museum, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, John Davis Gallery in Hudson, NY. And they’ve impressed each time; despite their clumped surfaces, slumping poses, and disproportional limbs, they possess a kind of scourged dignity. Physically blighted, Gagnier’s figures seem paradoxically uplifted — or at least resolutely self-possessed — in spirit.
An exhibition currently in John Davis’s carriage house space reveals another side of the sculptor. Twelve of Gagnier’s paintings, five-to-six feet in height, explore the pictorial counterpart to his sculptures. Each depicts a single nude (all but one standing) in dark, simple spaces. Built up from many feathered layers of paint — dates reveal that all have been reworked over a period of years, some more than a decade — the figures pulse with subtly atmospheric color and supple contours that course from head to toe.
The motif of a lone figure in a dark, vertical format brings to mind certain paintings by Dürer and Lucas Cranach, and Gagnier’s fluency of modeling and atmosphere leave no doubt about his awareness of such precedents. Like his sculptures, however, these paintings overturn every tradition of the ideal. The poses are inelegant, sometimes cryptically awkward; limbs are distended or compressed; details made eccentric, so that feet may be swollen, and eyes and nipples turned into eerie, target-like concentric circles. Some of Gagnier’s subjects feel like deer fixed by the glare of headlights — startled and a little discomfited to be the focus of his willful attentions. In others cases, the warmth of empathy shows through, for instance in the half-smile of the quietly radiant “Touching the Neck” (2010–14) and in the vulnerable figure of “Standing” (2010–12), in which a distant floor line accents the loneliness of a deep, dim space.

Bruce Gagnier, “Arm behind the Head/Male” (2010–14), acrylic on linen, 72 x 36 in (click to enlarge)
At times Gagnier appears to tussle more with styles of traditional painting than with its internal compositional tensions. As with his figure sculptures, the paintings tend to set small, evocative articulations within broadly conceived poses; they coalesce through vigorous local modelings and a cohering attitude, rather than through a taut pacing of intervals. But then there’s a painting like “Arms behind the Head/Male” (2010–14), which unfolds with something like classical measure. Here, contrasting moments add one upon the other; pinks of flesh stand out particularly powerfully against a deep brown-green background, and coiled fingers at the figure’s hip pace the sweeping pose, from the foot — anchored by the articulations of each toe — to the culmination of the head with its strange target-eyes. The frozen stare feels all the odder, peering as it does from cadenced rhythms.
One of Gagnier’s small sculptures of heads is on view in John Davis’s main building. (Inquire, and you may have the treat of seeing several more in storage.) These heads are my very favorite works by the artist. Molded physically, rather than suggested through two-dimensional renderings, the idiosyncrasies of the subjects register with a compact deliberateness. The most intensely individualized of his works, the heads possess a weighty, mysterious presence that transcends style and taste.

Bruce Gagnier, “Untitled (head)” (1990s), ceramic, 9.5 x 6.5 x 6 in
Bruce Gagnier continues at John Davis Gallery (362 ½ Warren Street, Hudson, New York) through August 10.
looks like beast jesus
Wonderful review!
I totally disagree with you about the heads though. Really I
just don’t understand most of what you say about the heads. I get that you like
the heads. I like them too. I love them! But you seem to be saying the heads have
qualities/virtues as sculpture (they’re “molded physically,” etc.) that are
missing from the paintings. Are you really dismissing the paintings as “two-dimensional
renderings”?
Earlier in your review you say Bruce’s paintings “explore
the pictorial counterpart to his sculptures.” You note that some of the
paintings have been worked on over more than a decade. You got me thinking: Titian/Delacroix didn’t make sculpture. A bunch of great 20th century painters did:
Matisse, Picasso, Giacometti. Recently in NYC we’ve seen shows of sculpture and
paintings by Sterling Ruby/Lygia Clark. This back and forth between painting
and sculpture is not a trivial matter. Bruce takes it seriously. And so do you.
You continually bounce Bruce’s paintings off his sculpture. (That’s
great for avid Hyperallergic readers like Roberta Smith and me, readers who
have seen all the recent shows that Bruce’s work popped up in. I wonder though,
is Jane Lane familiar with the sculpture? I really, REALLY like her comment: “looks
like beast jesus.”) You bring in “the tradition of the ideal”—but almost in the
same breath you’re talking about Durer and Cranach. Are Durer and Cranach
really part of the tradition of the ideal? Do they not break with it in much
the same way Bruce does? When you talk about Bruce’s “fluency of modeling and
atmosphere,” his “awareness of precedents”—what are you saying? Maybe you’re
saying Bruce is a very sophisticated painter. I agree, but it’s NOT Bruce’s “sophistication”
that strikes me first when I look at the paintings. Then you say Bruce “appears
to tussle more with styles of traditional painting than with its internal
compositional tensions.” I’m lost. I see a very real engagement with “internal
compositional tensions,” with where the figures stand, with how they relate to
the picture plane. The “tussle with styles” is pretty fierce it seems to me.
Bruce can’t get anything to work. He’s not happy about that, but he keeps
trying.
So there: maybe I “disagree” with everything you say. (Whatever
“disagree” means.) I still think your review is wonderful, sensitive,
intelligent, brave, etc. Bruce’s work is very hard to talk about. It “looks
like beast jesus” as Jane Lane says. It’s extraordinarily beautiful at the same
time. I hope/I bet more people will talk about it because of your review.
Idk…I’ve spent my life busting my butt trying to produce figure renderings with skill and depth, and teaching my students to do so…and this is what gets the art world’s attention? Gah! All right, enough whining…back to work I go.
Shirley Hazlett, two things:
1.
I don’t think Bruce’s paintings get much
attention from the art world. John Goodrich’s review is exceptional.
Hyperallergic is exceptional. All kinds of “wrong” things get attention from
the art world. You’re right to be suspicious of the often ultimately
cynical/empty expertise that passes for authority there. But keep reading
Hyperallergic, keep questioning critics—and keep working.
2.
I get the feeling you don’t think Bruce’s paintings
are extraordinarily beautiful. I do. (Maybe Jerry Saltz does.) Why? First, I
think the figures are placed in space, in depth beautifully, musically—each part
of a figure relates to all the others beautifully, musically. Try to get
photography out of your head: just look at where things are in space. There are
fat forms and skinny forms, fat/skinny enough to be disturbing, but never
outrageous: always there’s a sense of measure, sometimes a sense of humor, that
keeps the figures dignified, human, beautiful. Beautiful because true. ““Beauty
is truth, truth beauty,” that is all/Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.”
True to what? True to life. Holland Cotter has some nice words about African masks,
about “aliveness” in a mini-memoir at the NY Times website now: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/06/arts/design/a-memory-museum-courtesy-of-a-critic-curator.html?ref=design.
But it’s Jane Lane’s beast/Jesus formulation that gets at the humanity, the
beauty at the heart of Bruce’s paintings. There’s an animal-like/less-than-“human”
vitality inhabiting Bruce’s figures, but it’s balanced by something “Jesus”-like,
an understanding of Christianity that’s as complex as Thomas Aquinas’s, that
includes Karl Marx—but that’s NOT thousands of pages long, NOT written in Latin
or German. It’s just right there in front of you. After all, what’s more
frightening than love?