Monday, May 29, 2006

Nicole Eisenman at Leo Koenig

Stopped by to see Nicole Eisenman's show again on Friday afternoon for the first time since the opening. All the hubbub's been about the sprawling, ambitious two-paneled "Progress: Real and Imagined", but it was the smaller paintings in the back room that brought it home for me. They let me in.


The painting Mountain Man is so good--so real--that it's scary. It reminded me of that Ronnie Wood lyric, "I'm lost and I'm lonely./Lookin' hard for your love." Actually, the whole show made me think of the song. That, and Nietzche's assertion that "progress is an illusion." Yep. It's that kinda throwdown. Everything's on fire.







4 comments:

Heart As Arena said...

Exu. You're welcome. I noticed that too. What is UP with that?

Anonymous said...

Great great great. Epic and complex and wondrous. HAA you did, you brought it to life with the pictures. This show is sprawling like a novel.

Anonymous said...

HAA! Thanks for the close up shots. As MM said, the painting is epic and it is so hard to take in with just one or two visits. You chose some incredible close ups. And I happen to love the small ones--so lucious and funny. Especially the MM painting.

Heart As Arena said...

Yep. You're all right. It's a lot. When I looked back at that next to last one with the patches of blank canvas and the ear it made me think of Bonnard, Van Gogh, Basquiat, and Rene Ricard's "The Radiant Child." I mean, that's only two items in a patch of the painting. Crazy.