黑料不打烊

Posited by Klossowski, the 鈥減hantom鈥� is an obsessional mental image produced by forces of impulse in the psyche. Discomposure, akin to anxiety and other emotive impulses, fuels these 鈥減hantoms鈥�. Artists may use them to push otherwise representational images into unforeseen permutations, while allowing materials to help distort their appearances further. Each in their unique ways, Carroll Dunham, Victor Estrada, Elizabeth Murray, and Sterling Ruby have worked in this fashion with traditional materials, borrowing tropes from cartoons, modern figuration, and post-war abstraction, estranging them further through obsessive and prolific studio practices. In two drawings by the late Elizabeth Murray, one of which is entitled 鈥淲hazzat #1,鈥� a cartoony body splays across the picture plane, as if subjective reality contorted itself in response to a frenetic and tense urban life: they are cubist reveries gone awry. In his works on paper, Carroll Dunham submits to his id with renderings of contorted women, often revealing their engorged genitalia. His drawings, always signed with the month, day, and year, serve almost as diaristic notations for his phantoms. Both Dunham and Murray exploit the atavistic tendencies in drawing and painting, reacting to a discomposure that cannot be understood intellectually. Victor Estrada begins with similar cues, albeit twisting and exaggerating figures in an 鈥淎merican鈥� landscape. Aspects of surrealism and abjection are paired with his anxious building of topographical textures with acrylic paint; he insists that his figures seemingly remain in state of primordial becoming. Similarly for Sterling Ruby, his polychrome ceramic work, entitled 鈥淔acial (6377),鈥� feels almost pre-Neolithic. Here, the aforementioned 鈥減hantoms鈥� are seemingly expedited into soft clay鈥攁nd hardened by fire, an impulse of nature itself.