After Hours at IRL Gallery

Yuwei Tu, Jade, 2024. Oil on acm panel, maple wood frame, 10.5 x 16 in. (25 x 41cm). Photo credit: Yanmei Jiang, Courtesy of IRL Gallery

By DAVID JAGER October 28, 2024

Realism, which always seems to return in cycles in the art world, is having a moment. Critics have noticed its return at the Venice Biennale, where figurative and representational work seemed ascendent. Often it is works with a historical pedigree tweaked for comic or ironic effect, such as Eva Juszkiewicz's 19^th century style aristocratic portraits where the faces of her sitters are completely obscured by flowers or hair.

The current show of realist painting at IRL gallery doesn’t go to these extremes, but they explore the cinematic and dreamlike spaces that are opened up in moments of intimacy. Featuring the works of Gigi Rose Gray, Marjano and Denis Kapurani and Yuwei Tu, they provide an engaging window into the work of some of our newest painters.

The definition of intimate, however, seems largely mercurial in this show as are the painting styles here. It could be a private moment shared in a crowd, or pausing to sit alone in a garden courtyard. What is intimate is the intensity of the artist’s gaze and the moments unfolding between the subjects in them. Nevertheless, the artists chosen for this tiny jewel box of a show are not meant to harmonize. Rather they glance off each-other, showing that representation in painting is as much a matter of degree and style as is any other alleged painting genre.

Gigi Rose Gray, with a realism that seems indebted to the aesthetics of cinema, soap operas, and celebrity photography, provides us with tightly framed and zoomed in moments of melodrama. “Don’t Look Back” is a truncated closeup of a woman in profile occupying the center of the canvas. The figures surrounding her are as mute and illegible as she appears to be nearly spotlit and poignant. However, it is impossible to know if this is an actual psychological fact of the painting or a trick of the framing. This is, in fact, the tension of the painting.

Gigi Rose Gray, Don’t Look Back, 2024. Oil on linen, 35 x 28 inches. Photo credit: Yanmei Jiang, Courtesy of IRL Gallery

Is she experiencing a panged moment of loneliness? Is she wondering what is it all for? Has she spotted a rival? We’ll never know, but we admire her smooth bronzed skin, high cheekbones, button nose and blonde, carefully mussed hair cascading down the side of her face. We are given a moment of poignancy that may not be a poignant moment at all. Gray is recreating the projection we all live with continuously, as rabid consumers of social media. The same with the painting ‘Mine or yours’: the closeup is on three figures, a woman standing behind a man while a female hand rests in accosting fashion on his shoulder. It suggests a love triangle, but we cannot be sure. This is all merely projection on our part. There is no way of knowing, and that is part of the paintings allure.

Marjano & Denis Kapurani, NYBNYC (New York Boiga New York City), 2024. Oil on wood, 16 x 20 in. (40 x 50cm). Photo credit: Yanmei Jiang, Courtesy of IRL Gallery

Marjano and Denis Kapuranji, the most intriguing painters in the show, have a similar flair for drama, except that their work as a painting duo appears slightly more mannerist in approach. There is a disconnect between figures in the forgrounds and backgrounds that suggests early film, back drops, a sort of theatricality that amplifies the moment and makes it strange. The brilliantined dandy sipping his coffee in ‘Night Hawks’ -his coffee cup carefully poised, one hand dramatically flung back- in a way that precludes any naturalism. This is not a tired joe sipper caught by a wandering painter’s solitary eye, as it is in the Hopper painting it references. He’s posing as a nighthawk, and his surroundings, behind a collaged counter in front and what appears to be a painted backdrop behind him, suggests theatrical staging rather than something in situ.

Their painting NYBNYC edges into full blown surrealism with an underwear clad woman in a fur jacket. Her expression is unreadably modelesque, and her body is oddly foreshortened. It’s hard to know if she is sitting or standing with her pelvis thrust extremely forward. A small coral striped snake is ascending directly from her navel, and she points to it, almost warningly. It’s a throwback to the cryptic gestures of early mannerist symbolism, she could be pointedly grabbing another woman’s nipple. The painting duo have crystallized an odd personal moment representing what- vanity? Jealousy? Kundalini rising?- in a strangely compelling way.

Yuwei Tu, on the other hand, is much more direct in her two works, which seems concerned with capturing intergenerational moments very much rooted in Chinese culture. “In Stillness I Find You” her study of a grandmother enjoying moment seated in a summer courtyard, is full of technical assurance and poignancy. Surrounded by lush greenery coiffed in traditional Chinese garden style, she seems lost in recollection worthy of Maxine Hong Kingston. Her diptych of two hands grasping each other across two canvases repeats the subtle theme of relationship across time or cultures, rendered with a fleshiness that borders on the hyperreal. Of all of the works in the show, Tu’s seem to be the most invested in an almost photographic mimesis while being entirely straightforward emotionally.

That being said, there is something that seems to be haunting the new representational realism, especially the lion’s share of this show. The idea that the painters eye is also a camera, or that notion that the painter’s eye is always accompanied by or quoting the camera in some way. This is a long way off from the ‘camera obscura’ or optic lenses that allowed painters to achieve their photographic likeness in the classical period: the person in the purview of a camera lens, whether a film camera or surveillance camera, is now a subject of painting. It isn’t that the person resembles a photograph, it is that the person resembles a person in the process of being filmed or photographed. A new meta level uncanniness has creeped in, and the new realists are playing with it. WM