Wayne Gonzales

Paula Cooper Gallery, New York
Through November 24

When one considers the impact that the assassination of President Kennedy had upon the social and political history of the United States, one cannot help but be surprised at how little this event has interested artists as a subject for painting. One wonders whether a great majority of artists questioned either their ability or the capacity of contemporary painting to tackle such dramatic content. Is the subject taboo? Are artists practicing a form of self-censorship?

These thoughts arise as one contemplates Wayne Gonzales’ latest series of paintings, which examine the assassination somewhat elliptically. The artist treats this subject—one that has fascinated him for some time now—in a detached and abstracting manner. His compositions are based on preexisting images that relate to various participants in the tragedy.

The head of Lee Harvey Oswald, presented in monumental scale, is reduced to five large, flat areas painted in four different shades of pink. This work harks back to Andy Warhol’s glamorous images of Marilyn and Liz by way of Gary Hume’s emphatically two-dimensional silhouettes. A large horizontal picture with lettering, vertical stripes, and a drawing of a scantily clad barmaid flanking a colossal martini glass, painted in brown, through stencils, over a bright fluorescent pink ground, resembles a flashy billboard. It alludes to Jack Ruby’s career as a nightclub owner, as does a beautiful copper-colored painting of a stripper, in which the pixels of the original photograph have become large, flat dots raised into relief.

In a painting based on a still from the Zapruder film, pixels are radically transformed, appearing in many different colors as small, overlapping squares defining both forms and a space that have become illegible—Signac on amphetamines. Highly stylized pixels were the trademark of Roy Lichtenstein, and his Man with Folded Hands—a painting based upon a published schematic rendering of the lines in a picture by Cézanne—is paraphrased in a diagram of the trajectory of a bullet through two seated bodies. Gonzales’ pictures examine how images, which are by their very nature abstract, have shaped our collective memory.




Michaël Amy