While prolific interdisciplinary artist Alex Da Corte has made his mark in recent years with any number of eye-catching and , his exhibition 鈥淭he Whale,鈥� which occupies most of the second floor of the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, is the first museum show to focus on his relationship to the medium of painting.
Not a typical painting show, its variety reflects the breadth of Da Corte鈥檚 background. Born into a family of house painters, and raised in Venezuela and New Jersey, Da Corte started out as an aspiring animator, and founded and operated a plaster company to pay for art school.
The focus on painting, as intelligently conceived and executed by curator Alison Hearst, is an enlightening one. It shows how, within the contemporary art world, painting is more likely to be treated as a component of a larger image-installation complex, than as a discrete object, self-contained within the four sides of a rectangular frame.
The all-around, fully designed installation seems like a trend at the moment, whether by the likes of , and within museum spaces, or outside them. Although Da Corte鈥檚 show, which still places some emphasis on individual paintings, without entirely subsuming them into the immersive experience, is more traditional than some of the others, it is still oriented towards the creation of a unified atmospheric effect.
The painting focus also brings some clarity and coherence to a sprawling body of work, and sparks provocative comparisons with adjacent, earlier works by other artists. In a bold move, Da Corte has curated some of his works into galleries alongside the museum鈥檚 permanent collection, the first time an artist has done this at the Modern.
Meanwhile, the rooms hung solely with Da Corte鈥檚 work feature not only the numbered and labeled pieces in the catalog, but painted walls and furniture as well, reinforcing the overall atmosphere using Da Corte鈥檚 bouncy high-keyed color palette of pastels and primary colors, with glossy finishes and sweeping lines.
The distinctive color palette contributes to the cumulative effect, which is also reinforced by his treatment of the works鈥� surfaces. None of the pieces in the show are straight-up oil or acrylic on canvas, in the venerable meaning of the word 鈥減ainting鈥� as it is usually found in museum collections.
Instead, they either push outward from the wall, as in the 鈥減uffy paintings鈥� and the assemblages of manufactured objects mounted on the front of the 鈥渟latwall paintings,鈥� or place the paint behind a transparent Plexiglas surface, as in the 鈥渞everse glass paintings.鈥� Perhaps the most thought-provoking work in the show is a video about the act and meaning of painting, in which Da Corte plays the role of conceptual artist Marcel Duchamp.
As a result, a viewer鈥檚 attention is not turned toward the nuances of each brushstroke and inch of the canvas, as in a traditional painting, but toward the impression of the pictures altogether.
The most eye-catching works are the upholstered 鈥減uffy paintings,鈥� The Pied Piper and The Anvil, for which the artist has extracted shapes from comic books (Bugs Bunny and Baby Huey, respectively), enlarged them to a frightening degree, rendered them in 6-inch-thick foam upholstered in neoprene, and hung them on the wall in front of abstract swooping curves, like trophies from an amusement park prop room. (The anvil鈥檚 shape, which resembles a whale tail, led through a chain of associations to the show鈥檚 title.)
For the 鈥渟latwall paintings,鈥� Haymaker and A Time To Kill (which alludes to the 2016 Pulse nightclub shooting), Da Corte takes the horizontally grooved panels normally used to mount store displays, paints them in bright colors, and adorns them with characters from The Wizard of Oz, Frozen and Star Wars and an array of commercial products, creating a tension between the banal and the sinister.
For the 鈥渞everse glass paintings,鈥� Da Corte transmogrifies imagery from a vast assortment of album covers, magazine covers and other pop icons into slick, almost-familiar form. In the same gallery are glass display cases with the works鈥� source materials (supplemented by the artist鈥檚 explanations of his sources in the puffy-covered ). Unraveling the intricate web of the artist鈥檚 canon of references, and making sense of his treatment of them, gave me the sense of being inducted into a particular subculture by one of its most knowledgeable and fluent fans.
Da Corte鈥檚 encyclopedic mental catalog of mass culture images, and his high-powered visual intelligence, give viewers a lot to look at and think about, all tied together via the high-keyed color palette into a well-integrated immersive experience. But while Da Corte鈥檚 adeptness at orchestrating and remixing commercial imagery is awe-inspiring, I eventually became dubious about the centrality of childhood and teenage image culture to the show.
The work鈥檚 themes seemed heavy on the furious creativity and emotional intensity of youth, but light on the sobriety and responsibilities of adult life. While never bored in the galleries, after having scrutinized the umpteenth repurposed magazine cover and drugstore product, I started to feel like I was trapped inside the Teen Vogue website, wondering how long Da Corte will be able to maintain this level of intensity, and what the eventual 鈥渓ate work鈥� of such a brilliant, preternaturally youthful artist might look like.
Details
鈥淎lex Da Corte: The Whale鈥� is on view at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, 3200 Darnell St., Fort Worth, through Sept. 7. Tuesday through Sunday 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., Friday until 8 p.m. Adults $16, seniors, military and first responders $12, students $10, under 18 free, half-price on Sundays and free on Fridays. 817-738-9215 or visit .
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