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Unlocking ourselves from the latticework of gazes entwining Kerry James Marshall's 2015 work, Untitled (Studio), we see, front and center, a simple wooden paint-spattered table holding various and sundry objects. Among the expected trapping of an artist's workspace (brushes and canisters of paint), we find a peculiar arrangement of objects: a partially eaten cupcake accompanied by a knife resting on the edge of a small pink plate, an empty teacup, a miniature bust of Abe Lincoln, a large glass jar stuffed with a bouquet of small wildflowers, a goldfinch feasting on a small, brown pile of morsels, a book with a model skull resting atop it, and swatches of colored paper tacked to the side corner of the table. Far from mere accouterments garnishing the larger figural work, this embedded still life works as a visual metonym for the genre itself—each object an emblem of the genre's many iterations: trompe l'oeil (the tacked paper), domestic (teacup and cake), floral, and vanitas (the skull). The small bird is perhaps even a nod to Pliny's parable of Parrhasius and Zeuxis (a comment on the potential for deception in even the most quotidian of images?). The self-referentiality of the still life is a tip of the hat to a larger dialogue that Marshall wants us to consider, one for which the genre's discursive devices are particularly well suited.

Marshall's vigorous engagement with the canon of Western art has been well explored. Less explored, however, is his particular engagement with still life. His dialogue with the genre is perhaps not always as explicit as with others, such as history, portraiture, and genre painting. However, this lack of overt reference does not diminish still life's presence in his work. It is hard to find a piece by Marshall that does not awash his figures in a full array of objects—each one carrying its own particular weight and meaning, together creating a unified expression, a kind of gesamtkunstwerk of black cultural experience. Through his paintings, Marshall demonstrates a keen awareness of the ways in which, through objects, we imprint our environments with the traces of our inner selves as well as our historical heritage and baggage. However, beyond the role of self-fashioning and expression, to which objects serve, Marshall actively examines, plays with, and interrogates the more fluid boundaries between object and subject—particularly, the question of at what moment does the former alter or determine the latter?

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Factsheet for Peder Balke, Fra Nordkapp, 1853:

Nearly lost to obscurity, the nineteenth-century Norwegian landscape painter Peder Balke (1804–1887) only recently became resurrected as an important figure of Northern Romanticism. Although his radical political convictions eventually ended his artistic career, his idiosyncratic methods and style situated him at the forefront of a then burgeoning Nordic modernism.

Balke was born on the small agrarian island of Helgøya, Norway, to an impoverished working-class family. Before studying under the Romantic painter Johan Christian Dahl, Balke began his career as a house painter, decorating interiors with faux marbling and stencils. He translated these methods to his easel painting, first putting down a smooth, hard base of white paint and then adding a wet layer of dye that he worked with a sponge, felt, fingers, or a coarse brush. Although dismissed as a shabby way of painting by his contemporaries, this innovative technique allows the white background to shine through, creating the illusion of depth that would become the hallmark of Balke’s striking compositions.

Perhaps more formative than his academic training was his intimate contact with nature. Balke was the first Norwegian artist to sail north, navigating the icy Barents Sea hundreds of miles past the Arctic Circle, making him also the first artist to depict these landscapes. Balke would undertake numerous voyages, oftentimes on foot, along the Norwegian coast, seeking to both uncover and experience the unsettling presence of the Romantic sublime firsthand. His landscapes effectively metabolized these experiences into poetic visions, fusing observation with intense emotional expression. Although greatly influenced by Caspar David Friedrich, whom he met in Dresden during his travels, Balke’s paintings differed in their more mannered style, oftentimes favoring abstracted forms over more mimetic renderings. Nevertheless, the influence of Friedrich and Dahl is evident in Balke’s preference for symmetrical compositions and a monochrome palette as well as in the view of nature as a symbol of the sublime.

The present work depicts the North Cape in northern Norway, a volcanic rock plateau rising one thousand feet above sea level. Balke visited the North Cape only once, in 1832, but his memory of the experience became a source of inspiration for the rest of his lifetime. By 1853, the landscape—at the time believed to be the northernmost point in Europe—had become a signature image to which Balke returned to again and again. This characteristic nocturnal seascape offers a dramatic moonlit view of the landmass and the sea, along with scattered figures and detailed ships. Balke’s rich palette, ranging from dark blue to burnt umber, highlights the juxtaposition between light and shadow, especially evident in the semitranslucent ice coating the rock. A canny use of materials and texture is exemplary of Balke’s mature style: the flat sky smoothly coats the paper support, while the dark-gray jutting rock is rendered with visible brushstrokes and the surface of the water includes protruding areas of impasto. Describing an earlier North Cape painting exhibited in Oslo in the fall of 1848, a critic wrote that it “is deserving of interest on account of the nature of the subject, but also because of the particularity of the perception of the chosen moment. The dark precipice, protruding into the bright light of the rising moon, with its steep drop and the horizontal outline of its plateau at the foot of which the polar sea is quietly rocking, does not fail to affect the imagination of the spectator.”

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Watteau’s works, through the life experiences of the artist to the collecting habits of those who composed the bulk of his buyers, operated within the realm of social emulation. For his bourgeois buyers, Watteau’s fêtes galantes would have functioned as a currency of status in both their existence as objects of art as well as in their visual offerings: luscious, overgrown nature, sumptuous gowns and costumes, and idle leisure. The tactics of bourgeois sociability, of appropriation and repurposing, of rendering abstract and malleable symbols that once were tethered to singular, historically rooted meaning, and even of self-conscious imitation all find home in Watteau's works. His fêtes galantes are explorations in social performance, in the interchange of gesture, posture, and dress. However, he is not concerned with the specificity of meaning, but in the overall effect, in the pure aestheticism of the social body. The elusiveness and ambiguity in these works reflect this concern, but they also reflect a more general phenomenon occurring in his society—the visual discursive field of an old order being permeated by foreign agents. The visual culture of one was being parasitized by the other, transforming them both in the process.

The instability, or rather fluidity, of the discursive structure of cultural emulation, with its unmooring of signifiers, opened up space within the visual imagination for unsanctioned and hybrid commixture of genres (both high and low), styles, and forms. From the explosion of consumer goods, with the faux-luxe among them, to the profusion of advertisements, both shop signs and in print, the visual landscape of early eighteenth-century Paris opened out into a kaleidoscopic and heterogeneous display of visual forms. In this context, the perfect playing ground was cultivated for Watteau's imaginative faculties and allowed for an exploration in ambiguity, artifice, and social performativity as an aesthetic act.

Artifice and the deceptions of sight are all front and center in Watteau’s fêtes galantes. For instance, there is no narrative to follow, no privileged site of action, no central figure or figural grouping to anchor our attention and thus interpretation. Instead, what is provided is a lateral dispersal of figures where the primacy of the human form is thwarted, even as the body’s carnal desires are invoked. The figures are dwarfed within the pictorial space that they encompass with their bodies and flesh hidden underneath their costumes. In effect, this deemphasis of the body obstructs the potential for erotic gratification and thus precludes any seduction of pictorial illusion with it. Instead of becoming wholly enraptured within the figures’ world, which becomes an extension of our own, we are constantly drawn in only to be pushed back out again. The space in which the figures reside is unnavigable; there is no single vantage point nor a single source of light, and the spatial relations between figures and objects do not follow the laws of perspectival convention. Instead, Watteau stresses an admittance to painting’s inherent artificiality and attention to its surface quality. In effect, Watteau’s works renege on the traditional prerogatives of Academic painting of either platonic ideals or to mimesis of nature. Instead, he allowed his art to function on its own terms. Mimicking the logic of the imitation luxury item or the emulating bourgeois, Watteau took the potent visuality of polite society, emptied it of any direct social and historical meaning, and transformed it into unfettered aesthetic play.

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The terror faced amid great calamity can, without a doubt, be pacifying. Nevertheless, when one looks at the hyperbole of horrors that characterize our current period (an endless pandemic, fascist resurgences, climate catastrophes, etc.), it is hard not to laugh at the absurdity of it all. We laugh so as not to cry, or perhaps, we laugh in tandem with our tears, as if they are two impulses of the same yolk.

The humor that undergirds Simon Foxall's work shares its source with this same intuitive and primordial laughter roused in moments of terror and solemnity. Amid flames and darkened clouds, Foxall's figures dance with ecstatic jubilance or pose and play under the ghostly visitation of a long-deceased icon. Their deformed and comically exaggerated bodies at once match their foreboding environments and simultaneously subvert any fear of threat through their cheerful disposition and incontestable charm. Foxall skillfully and with deep sensitivity traverses along the tension-wound high wire of our human condition, wrestling for meaning and joy in the face of impermanence and unyielding change.

These figures who dance amongst flames appear to relish in the heat—the flame's lick only energizes their entranced play. A blue sports car blazes behind the ecstatic couple in Adam and Denise. A play on Adam and Eve, no less; however, is this now Adam and his second fling? (Or, better yet, Adam and his beard?) Either way, the religious allusion is made only to be fancifully perverted—fig leaves are replaced with shiny-green, strappy thongs and triangle bikini tops, trading modesty for unrepentant flamboyance. One could imagine finding such a scene among the many intricate and innumerable figures in Hieronymus Bosch's deliriously fantastical triptych Garden of Earthly Delights. However, here the three stages of mankind, from prelapsarian to the judgment in hell, have all been collapsed into a single frame, a single event—divisions eradicated, the holy becomes profane. There is nothing saintly or sinful, only life with its tragedies and joys rejoicing arm in arm in a dance macabre.

The overall ethos of Foxall's work is that of the carnivalesque spirit—free and released from the laws of officialdom and in celebration of change, transience, and renewal of life (and death). Here Foxall is tapping into a long lineage of comic ritual dating back to antiquity and finding predominance in medieval culture and art, the principal element of which is the grotesque. Characterized by hybridity and fluidity of form, the grotesque subverts rigid binaries, boundaries, and fixed law in favor of protean bodies that slip past sanctioned decorum, gender roles, or ableist conformity. The nature of the carnivalesque and the grotesque run awfully close to the ideas and culture of queerness, both of which seek to upturn hieratic structures and divisions, degrading such hierarchies through a universalizing laughter. Perhaps it would be apt to say that Foxall is playing in the visual parlance of the Queer Grotesque.

The paradigmatic figure of this topsy-turvy, carnivalesque pathos is the drag queen. Beyond "chicks with dicks," the drag queen asphyxiates all dualities with spews of cheap hairspray. Foxall's Amoureuse serves us a tickled pink blondie with sculpturally coiffed curls and a four o'clock shadow that darkens a chiseled jaw and dimpled chin. Their candy-red lips appear taut with strain as they effort to maintain a rather maniacal smile. In contrast, their seductive green eyes leak delicate tears, careful not to streak the thick black eyeliner and mascaraed lashes. Happy or sad? Such distinctions are sometimes hard to discern. Gingerly clasped between two fingers (of which hand is uncertain) is a large flocculent dandelion pappus, bringing to mind childhood games of will-she-won't-she. If all the seeds are gone in one blow, the one you love will love you back. However, Amoureuse's pappus is still intact, a moment pregnant with potential, fickle and transient, brimming with both hope and fear. Thus is the Drag Queen—a singularity containing multitudes.

The thread of fluidity and transmutation runs deep throughout Foxall's work, not only in his imagery but in his practice as well. From Konrad Witz, commedia dell'arte, and Bernardo Strozzi to Tom of Finland and Monty Python, Foxall gleans imagery from across Western art historical canon and culture and metabolizes his quotations into a purely contemporary pictorial language. Finland's idealized and hypersexed studs are amputated, contorted, cartoonish, and their sex diminutive in Foxall's figures. The archetypal image of the cis-male body is here hyperboled to the point of dislodging the latter's privileged position—opening space for a more universalizing queer aesthetic. The pieces' small and intimate size ( no larger 45 x 55cm) contrast with their expansive vision, compelling the viewer to draw in closer, to become more intimate. This dynamic emphasizes the onlooker's participation in the experience, absorbing them into the parodia sacra of the Queer Grotesque, laughing and crying at the same time.

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