Kris Knight.
Sayej, Nadja
KRIS KNIGHT
Katharine Mulherin Contemporary Art Projects, Toronto CANADA
December 1 * 22, 2007
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
It's hard casting the rod of memory back to teenage years
without wincing at all the pimples, slow dances, and wet dreams
involved. But in "How We Quit the Forest," Toronto-based
painter Kris Knight revisits his homosexual heyday by coming aboard the
Love Boat, promising something exciting and new for everyone.
His seventh solo show, Knight's diaristic account of
unrequited teen lust is a bit of departure from previous offerings.
Whereas before he painted mainly anonymous women and celebrities (like
his 2006 Hooker-Waitress, Model-Actress, a strangely dreamy portrait of
Courtney Love), he now appears to have returned to his youth spent in
Ridgetown, Ontario, here revealed as a magical, Dawson's Creek
world of languorous youths dickering around with other young hotties.
Imagine Anthony Goicolea's stuck-up models grooving to Death Cab
for Cutie or Belle & Sebastian, and you get the idea.
"How We Quit the Forest" reveals the 27-year-old artist
in the act of postdated wish fulfillment, even though one could easily
find most of these long-lost lovebirds on YouTube or Facebook. Knight
invites us to enter his imaginary forest--a "safe haven for teenage
love," his artist's statement reads--to play hide and seek,
hunter and hunted. Some paintings cross over into sexual territory, but
nothing is too explicit. As he goes on to explain, it would break the
spell to cut right to the chase. Best to leave matters in a state of
unresolved possibility.
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
Indeed, these kids are more prey than predator. Unlike the recent
swirl of hyper-feminist shows like "Global Feminisms" at the
Brooklyn Museum and "WACK!" at MOCA in Los Angeles, where many
of the works vacillate between dethroning the feminine from the temple
of classical beauty and worshipping it in the guise of mass struggle,
Knight grabs the bull by its horns. His demure flock of rosy-nosed,
pouting "Venusian" boys beg to be adored, and if it should so
happen that a museum show of gay contemporary art is in the works, then
Knight puts his best foot forward as well.
Long Way Home (For A Ghost Like You) (all work 2007) has one young
lovely--who looks very much like Knight himself, probably because he
uses his mother and sisters as models for his paintings--catching and
holding a suspicious glance from someone or thing way beyond his years.
In Lull, which bridges fantasy and direct memory, another nonchalantly peels a label off his bottle of Bud, unknowingly watched by a nearby and
just as beautiful happy camper.
These lovingly rendered paintings look almost photo-realist from
afar, but close up tend to dissolve into wet sweeping brushstrokes that
could easily be modeled after portraits by Lucian Freud or even Dana
Schutz. But instead of showing the decrepit side of life through chunky
layers of oil, Knight's characters are saturated in a sugary glaze,
giving them a quality similar to Catherine Opie's transgender
photographs or the comically charged kiddie drawings of Winnipeg artist
Daniel Barrow. Not for a second do any of these paintings cross the
line.
But they also come perilously close to self-idolatry. A few
canvases, such as Branches Break and Wild Turkey, struggle to escape the
fashionable pages of GQ or the gay indie rag BUTT, lacking sufficient
force of reason to appear in an art gallery. Although the meaning sets
in once you spot those distant headlights approaching in Fortress
Invaded and Signals, whose foreboding appearance cuts through the
secluded, otherworldly stillness like a knife. As the facial expressions
here suggest, the lights herald the dawning of dream's end.
Knight's reminiscences work best when haloed in a wintery blast, as
opposed to being cryogenically frozen in the hope of reviving old loves
lost.
