John Currin

Gagosian Gallery, Paris
Acquired by the present owner from the above in October 2013

Beverly Hills, Gagosian Gallery, John Currin, February - April 2015

This painting is in excellent condition. Under ultraviolet light there are no apparent restorations. The canvas is framed in a wood frame painted black with a gold gilt face.
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By expropriating and manipulating a mélange of historic idioms, John Currin’s exquisite Chateau Meyney epitomizes the artist’s profound reimagining of the figurative genre. Through his unparalleled technical mastery of oil paint, Currin’s hyperrealist clarity recalls the refined finesse of the Northern European Tradition, laying an aesthetic foundation that builds to recall a nuanced myriad of tropes regarding the female form as a subject of the male gaze. The illuminated bravura and compositional order of French Neo-classicism,  the warped idealism of high-Renaissance Mannerism , and the decadent frivolity of Rococo are all curiously filtered through the sensuality the 1950s Pin-up girl. Drawing equally from magazines, high school yearbooks, and in this case soft-core pornography, Currin’s dismissal of the boundaries between fine art and mass media, between excepted standards of taste and explicit taboo, results in a penetrating vision of what curator Robert Rosenblum has termed the ‘American Grotesque’; the conflation of a “venerable past and vulgar present.” (Robert Rosenblum, "John Currin and the American Grotesque" in Exh. Cat., Chicago, Museum of Contemporary Art (and travelling), John Currin, 2003, p. 15) Named hedonistically after the vineyard that produced the red wine offered by the protagonist, at Chateau Meyney, the offhand beguile of Currin’s intoxicated automaton and her erotic backdrop embody the specific libidinal excesses of American kitsch; a contemporary crucible for the mechanisms of heterosexual male desire that have birthed art’s nuanced iconography of female sexuality.

It was in the mid-1990s that Currin first played with campy images of sexualized women that inhabited unsettling positions between objects and subjects of desire. Initially indulging in comically risqué scenes of scantily clad and exceptionally busty women, towards  the close of the decade Currin’s satirical view of gender concepts was drawn back to consider the origins of the female nude within the medium of oil paint.  Surreal evocations of Lucas Cranach's sinuous nudes and Sandro Boticelli's excessive, heroic Venuses formed an initial point of entry into this rich history of paradigms.  Executed in 2013 and displaying the absolute perfection of the artist’s highly time-consuming technique, Chateau Meyney witnesses the apex of Currin’s journey through the breadth of female archetypes that have driven western visual culture.

Currin’s complex composition involves a dialogue between two discrete realities, imbuing an element of the surreal whilst demonstrating his refined technical aptitude.  We are immediately engaged by the foreground figure whose provocative pose seems at odds with her detached gaze. She leans forward and offers her exposed serpentine neck and voluptuous breasts for perusal. Beguiling and provocative, dressed in an embroidered shirt, floral hot pants and velveteen chemise, she embodies a curiously uncomfortable amalgamation of historic stereotypes that have inhabited the visual history of femininity. As Robert Rosenblum notes, Currin’s peculiar hybrids never settle too neatly within one stereotype, “slipping uncannily back and forth between memories of highly paid American fashion models with pinup girl pasts to the supernatural beauty of Renaissance Venuses or the sinister sexuality of Renaissance Eves."  (Ibid., p. 18)  Paradoxically, the boundless nostalgia of these heterogeneous cultural references places Currin’s model firmly within the aesthetic idiom of contemporary painting and its post-modern penchant for appropriation.

Currin notes how his subjects do not come directly from life: "The people I paint don't exist.  The only thing that's real is the painting.  It's not like a photograph where there's another reality that existed at a certain moment in time in the past.  The image is only happening right now and this is the only version of it." (the artist cited in Rochelle Steiner, "Interview with John Currin," in Exh. Cat., Chicago, Museum of Contemporary Art, Op. Cit., p. 77)  As such, the artist explores the philosophical idea of the simulacrum: a likeness without a set model or a copy without an original which may be argued as either inferior or superior to the various set of ‘original’ ideas that precede it. Currin’s peculiar background constructs a pornographic scene where another woman parallels the foreground figure’s offering of her breast, this time to a male partner.  Filtered through the fleshy pink palette, it is unclear whether this is a live action erotic moment, some hallucinatory vision, or a theatrical fuchsia backdrop for what becomes a comparatively sedate photo-shoot. Regardless, the narrative involves a progression of sexualization across the aesthetic schism and the viewer is curiously caught as implicit participant within the latent eroticism of the exchange. This pictorial structure also draws from old master paintings, such as Velazquez’s Las Meninas, that strove to ‘break the fourth wall’. Critically described by the term “mise en abyme” (meaning “placed into abyss"), and evoking the experience of being positioned between two mirrors, Currin plays with the constant cerebral duplications that can occur in an image that contains another image of itself within itself.  In this vein Currin summons a poignant comparison with Edouard Manet’s enigmatic 1882 masterpiece, A Bar at the Folies-Bergère, where a waitress and  implied sex worker appears to compositionally step out of her raucous surrounds in a moment of wistful escapism. Similarly, Currin’s foreground figure boasts greater relatable human agency than her ‘synthetic’ sepia backing, but the distinct whiff of inebriation emphasizes an indulgently unserious tone.  As such, Currin tears down the fraughtly coded taboos entrenched in the canon of female figure painting and irreverently substitutes Manet’s existential paroxysm for a lewd portrayal of the primal hedonism of sensual pleasures.