BY KEN JOHNSON
Works by Christina Ramberg and Victoria Gitman, in these excellent separate shows, are linked by a shared preoccupation with fetishism and women.
A fetish, in Freudian terms, is an inanimate object that someone finds erotic because of its intimate association with the human body. In the case of Ms. Ramberg, the sadly underknown Chicago Imagist who died in 1995, the objects in question are high-heel shoes, bras, corsets and similar accouterments as well as more overtly sadomasochistic forms of bondage.
In many funny and weird cartoon studies on paper, she pictures torsos, feet, hands and heads encumbered by such psychologically charged devices. In “Pinched Corset” (1971), one of her elegant small panel paintings, the index finger of a woman’s hand probes between the shiny black fabric of a tight corset and the otherwise naked back of another woman. Painted in severely muted colors — except for the red fingernails — it is slyly suggestive and wonderfully mysterious.
Ms. Gitman, who lives in Florida, paints life-size pictures of beaded purses with a verisimilitude that verges on magic realism. With a fine-tipped brush, she renders every tiny, glittering glass bead and the beautiful mosaic patterns that myriad beads add up to. The type of fetish that Karl Marx identified — the commodity — naturally comes to mind. But the purse also may be seen as the feminine equivalent of the cigar. Sometimes a purse is just a purse, but in Ms. Gitman’s hands it is certainly something more.
THE NEW VERISIMILITUDE
M+B and François Ghebaly Gallery,
Los Angeles
14 July – 2 September (M+B)
16 July – 20 August (François Ghebaly)
The Wikipedia entry for ‘verisimilitude’ kicks off with the uncharacteristically weighty line: ‘The problem of verisimilitude is the problem of articulating what it takes for one false theory to be closer to the truth than another false theory.’ It is productive to think of the two-gallery exhibition curated by François Ghebaly not as a parade of impressive stabs at reproducing reality but as a series of failures, albeit failures that unfold in different and expressive ways.
The New Verisimilitude never really reveals just what is new about the various forms of verisimilitude on show, nor does it explain how they are linked. At M+B, the larger of the two venues, a captivating videowork by David Levine, Present/Not Present [excerpt] (2006/9) is placed not far from Peter Rostovsky’s Miami Stadium (2008). The former shows footage of two men sitting in chairs and fidgeting. Only the list of works reveals that one is an actor and one is not, but which is which? The latter piece is a large painting of an American football stadium seen from high above; though competent, it is not photorealisitic (in that it couldn’t be mistaken for a photograph), but nor, I think, does it try to be. It’s hazy and atmospheric, and it encourages a feeling of drifting away from reality, not screwing it down.
There is an important distinction to make here: ‘verisimilitude’ equals neither photorealism nor hyperrealism. In fact, it has its etymological roots in drama, and more often refers to a convincing presence than it does to appearance alone. You can tell that Victoria Gitman’s exquisite paintings of beaded handbags are copied from life, not photographs. They have an immediacy (born, paradoxically, from painstaking production) that Karl Haendel’s pencil drawings lack. But Haendel’s work is about mediation itself: the labored process of transcription from object to photograph to pencil drawing to abstract collage—as with Pencil Stubs in Strips (2010), which he slices into Daniel Buren-style diagonals—is intended to create distance. If there is presence, it is the presence of the artwork, not its subject; if there is truth, it is philosophical rather than experiential.
The selection of works at Ghebaly’s own, smaller space was stronger than at M+B, principally because it made a virtue of diversity. Alongside Haendel’s Pencil Stubs in Strips and Gitman’s On Display (2008), Isaac Resnikoff carved a wooden sapling tied to two stakes, and a towering totem pole of stacked chairs. Both works had physical presence in spades, even if they had none of the accuracy of Yoshihiro Suda’s Camelia (2006), a perfect wooden bloom that sprouted from high up on one wall. Dan Finsel’s collaged Self Box #1 (2011), returns the conversation to drama: throughout his work, Finsel method-acts a character named Dan Finsel; the ‘self-box’ is an art-therapy exercise in which participants decorate a box to reflect their interior and exterior selves. He teaches us that while representations can be perfectly accurate, their subjects still can be false.
-Jonathan Griffin
For Argentina-born artist Victoria Gitman, a handbag is more than a fashion statement. The accessory is an archaeological specimen worthy of meticulous reproduction in her astonishingly lifelike paintings.
"I'm attracted to vintage purses and jewelry," the 35-year-old artist explains, "because they are artifacts laden with personal history, social significance, and aesthetic values."
"On Display" begins in the self-portraits inspired by the masterpieces of art history that Victoria Gitman copied as a student at Florida International University. In some of these, the female figure wears a chocker that later becomes the subject of Gitman's first jewelry painting. The desire to document a significant piece inspired her to develop a whole new series of work.
Download PDF (3.5 MB)Victoria Gitman's first solo show on the West Coast, at the Daniel Weinberg Gallery, introduces a marvelous talent. The young painter, born in Argentina and living in Miami, has ample skill and understated intelligence at her disposal.
Working small in oil on board, Gitman paints vintage accessories--beaded purses, filligree pins--and women, the latter copied from well-known portraits of the Renaissance on up. In the paintings of jewelry and purses, especially, she demonstrates exquisite technical finesse.