4. of girly paintings and the art market, newspaper reviews and phizmongers (2013)

ROBERTA SMITH of The New York Times wrote in 2008 that "[Elizabeth] Peyton's prominence is either a fluke or a further sign of the ascendancy of the feminine."

Over the last two decades a brand of 'disfiguration' —practised by female painters in particular—has been championed by the art market of all things. Beginning in the early '90s with the pumped-up on steroids disfiguration of English artists Cecily Brown and Jenny Saville, or American Lisa Yuskavage, to the more whimsically pretty disfiguration in the paintings of Americans Karen Kilminik, Elizabeth Peyton and Dana Schutz, these female artists exemplify art market success, fetching over two million euros in some instances, but not conceptual value. As painting is synonymous with the art market, and spectacle is a good marketing tool, how do artists who practise such disfiguration on the canvas avoid being typecast as clichéd purveyors of the ugly and the beautiful against the backdrop of the art market beast?

This symbiotic relationship between the feminine and the art market unintentionally surfaced in Cristín Leach’s Sunday Times review of Genieve Figgis's solo exhibition 'Fictitious Possibilities' at Talbot Gallery and Studios, Dublin. In the review Hughes's criticism of the global art market's ignorance of Irish artists was understandably general, but combined with the all-female cast of contemporary painters referenced by the critic (Allison Schulnik, Chantal Joffe, Dawn Mellor) vs the dead male ones (Bacon, Freud, Velasquez), and the ambiguous but potentially spectacular statement that the critic can't wait for Figgis to "go large," there is a sense from the review that Figgis's subject was being drowned out by the questions of gender inequality in the artworld and 'spectacle', rather than focusing on the ambitious modesty of the artist's painterly and conceptual concerns. As 'spectacle is a newspaper's bread and an editor's butter, newspaper art critic's are frequently being asked to dish it out on a table of binary arguments in their reviews. But to what cost to the artist and critic, and to what end? When spectacle vajazzles the subject of an artist's work, no matter how much attention the artist gets, there is a sense that the integrity of the artist and critic is being traded off for ... what? Admittedly, it must be a frustrating business for art critics who write for Irish newspapers. Articles are increasing built on superficial binary arguments or grand statements (i.e., 'rural vs urban', 'The Death of Painting ). The short-stacked paragraphs suggest rather than critically explore. I imagine such art critics have mountains of notebooks hidden in their living spaces where all the unexplored ideas and editor's deletions go; and perhaps a dartboard and voodoo doll graced with the editor's pin-pricked head. That said, is any attention better than no attention at all?

Speaking of attention, it's interesting that Cristin Leach mentions Irish artist Amanda Doran in her review of Figgis's exhibition, who graduated from NCAD in 2012. A young painter who showed massive promise in her Degree show, Doran was recently selected to exhibit in the Saatchi "New Sensations' (2012) and Saatchi NEW ORDER:

BRITISH ART TODAY (2013). This was not a surprise as Doran's ballsy application of subject had Saatchi written all over it before it had even left NCAD: but is that such a good thing? I'm not so sure. Minus the spectacle, Doran offers so much more via the luscious formalism performed in her paintings, as does Figgis. Perhaps there is no avoiding such cliched spectacle when it comes to disfigurative painting. It brings to mind Paul Virilio’s observation that "Nothing but disfiguring events" happened in the twentieth century. Or Mark Rothko admitted: 'I can no longer use the figure without destroying it." On the other hand, abstraction is usually better received by critics and curators.

Take for instance Turner Prize winner Tomma Abts, whose abstract paintings suggest rather than perform disfiguration, with their regimentally consistent first name titles. But when I think of Figgis and the potential for inflated art market attention I am catapulted back to the example of Karen Kilminik— whom Figgis evidently has an affinity with—and the question of how this "girly' subculture of painting continues to sit so pretty in the art market. Laura Cumming lambasted Kilmnik's solo show at the Serpentine Gallery, London, in 2007, when she wrote in The Guardian:

Wan and whimsical paintings — why does anyone want to make them? Why does any self-respecting painter ever set out to be feeble? Many do and have done for the last couple of decades to the point where deliberate feebleness can get you a show at a mainstream gallery.

And at the forefront, forging ahead from the start, were all those American women who seem to have created such a strong market out of pitiful weakness.

After experiencing Kilimnik's exhibition at the Serpentine gallery myself in 2007, I thought at the time that the artist's mix of dollhouse stagecraft and decoratively displayed paintings was overtly, sickly-feminine, in a forced My Little Pony kind of way. There was too much of Jane Austin and not enough Charlotte Bronte. There was also a sense that Kilmini was perpetuating a nostalgic turn for the Grand Style of eighteenth century English portraiture, exemplified by Joshua Reynolds and Thomas Gainsborough, painters who were a little My Little Pony themselves, and to whom English art critic Andrew Graham-Dixon referred to as 'phizmongers' (painters of the faces of the rich). The most interesting remark by Dixon in the same review from 1994, however, is his observation that Reynolds and Gainsborough's "discontent with the narrow scope of 18th-century English portraiture" and the "restricted taste of the English gentry" forced both painters to put lavish painterly execution before the

'true' appearance of their sitters. It maybe farfetched to describe the two Englishmen as the grandfathers of formalism, but Graham-Dixon's observation does bring us forward a couple of hundred years to Gerhard Richter's so-called ambition to render 'appearances', and Figgis's gout and chemical peeled 'appearances' of an age of innocence.

With the use of flowery script typeface on the printed worksheet for Figgis's 'Fictitious Possibilities' the artist made it clear to me, consciously or not, where she is coming from. However, I am left uneasy after reading Hughes's review. The crux of my unease was in regard to Hughes's 'branding' of Figgis within a contemporary outfit of established female figurative painters, and the critic's references to Lady Gaga and celebrity culture, a subject that has done its time by now, surely? I felt a year previous in The Irish Times that Aidan Dunne was more on the money when he wrote: "There is a paradoxical beauty to Genieve Figgis's outstanding, Dorian Gray-like paintings of celebrities, their glamour curdled and sickly.“ The celebrity aspect is still there in Dunne's description, but the Dorian Gray reference hits the spot, and without reducing the work to a REDTOP headline. However, while I was uneasy about Hughes's reading I was left unsatisfied with Dunne's. The latter seemed to hang like a discarded metaphor rather than a potentially complex analogic stage for Figgis's paintings.

Admittedly, in the narrow parameters of a newspaper overview of college art degree shows for which Dunne's loose observation was made in 2012, it is understandable that the critic hadn't the editorial manoeuvrability to dig deeper into his metaphor, left hanging like a shard of mirror that catches a quick glimpse of Figgis's painted disfigured subject. Does Dunne's "Dorian Gray-like" refer to what I see as the corrupted subjects of Figgis's paintings: Victorian literature, fashion, gender, history, class? Or is the critic referring to the abstract hidden promise of Figgis's portraits and what is happening outside the frame, as epitomised by the lost soul of Dorian Gray, whose beauty was captured —aptly enough with regard to Figgis's work—in a painted portrait. A painted portrait that would mutate and age with every hedonistic act that Dorian Gray 'committed' in real life, while he remained beautiful on the outside, albeit internally tormented; in the end killing himself through the act of stabbing his LIVE and mutated painted portrait, dead. In conversation with Paul Virilio, French theorist Sylvère Lotringer asked: "So that is what art would be. Painted faces, broken perceptions, make up art. In this compulsion to camouflage, there would be no recognition that the wound is bleeding right under the paint."

At Talbot Gallery Figgis's paintings are better painted than her MFA show, but there is a sense that 'Fictitious Possibilities' is a transitional show wherein the floodgates have been left open for anything goes output with regard to subject matter. There was an unusual repetitiveness in the close-up cropped portraits in the artists degree show in 2012 that made it more conceptual, whereas narrative conjoins her work at Talbot Gallery. However, Figgis's Portrait (2012), helps to derail what could end up being an obvious literary interpretation of Figgis's painted portraits of the horse-faced lads and lassies of the nineteenth century landed gentry.

Pictured is a gaping black silhouette, another Victorian signifier-but in this instance the silhouette is less the outline of a head and more the absence of a head; the shoulder and neck line of clothing is all that remains. The element that holds this decapitated painted absence in place is the suggestion of a circular gilded frame, that is cropped, top and bottom, by the edges of the paint support, the neck and shoulders holding the 'frame' in place, as if 'wearing' a frame for a head. Paintings and painters are usually obsessed with the painted edge, but in this particular painting by Figgis that obsession is inverted, and our gaze is forced centripetally towards the painting's absent centre.

This painting and other works such as Lady with patterned drool are more whimsy than REDTOP spectacle. Figgis could easily "go large" as Hughes suggests, by upping the ante of the torment that her not so street-wise cohort of pastoral protagonists are put through with the paintbrush. But I see these portraits as fantastical, not existential icons of torment, like Bacon and Freud. Her paintings are nostalgic for the traditional, but a literary tradition, not a painted one. They are pocket narratives: Wuthering Heights CliffsNotes. Figgis's Jesus - a portrait of the iconic Catholic sacred heart —is not profane. Either is her clownish "Pope" After Velasquez.

It's all makeup. Camouflage. Figgis's Skull is a portrait of a pumpkin-headed deformed prince that looks like either a Jack-O'-Lantern has been shoved onto Royal's head or he is a victim of the gluttonous disease of kings (gout).

In conclusion, I can understand Hughes's allegiance with female artists as women are still under-represented in the artworld: in the June 2013 issue of Art Monthly Jennifer Thatcher discusses gender inequality in the artworld against the backdrop of the "recent resurgence of feminism." Ironically, I am more interested in the female artists who have gained a foothold in the higher echelons of the art market. Even more ironically, it is the artists that get swallowed up by the 'Gasgosians' and 'Zwirners' of this world that become invisible, appearing now and then at secondhand bookshops in inflated monographs: or if you regular the private domestic basement galleries of the wealthy where the artists are placed in pull-out shelves. Ok, we all have to make some bread and butter but is this the destiny that the next generation of Irish artists should aspire to?